YouTube itself is the 'culprit' that has caused Internet Explorer 6 to 'die early' despite its large market share

Recently, Chris Zacharias - a former YouTube web developer has revealed the reason why Internet Explorer 6 users (IE6) dropped dramatically in 2009 (from 25% to less than 10% in just 1 year ) is because he and other YouTube engineers have plotted to "kill" this browser.

In 2009, when the T-Mobile G1 - the first Android was born and the new iPhone was two years old, IE6 was a browser with a high market share in the world despite being much more outdated than modern browsers. Updated regularly like Chrome or Firefox. However, YouTube engineers are not allowed to ignore this browser because 18% of YouTube users come from IE6. After having to constantly fix bugs related to IE6, the YouTube development team decided to take it down.

YouTube itself is the 'culprit' that has caused Internet Explorer 6 to 'die early' despite its large market share Picture 1
The chart shows that the number of users IE6 (light blue) fell sharply in mid-2009.

The group added a small banner on YouTube with the content that IE6 browser will no longer be supported by this video platform and recommends users to switch to using Firefox 3.5, iE8 or Google Chrome. Although that time, Microsoft has not released any information. This banner is only visible to IE6 users.

YouTube itself is the 'culprit' that has caused Internet Explorer 6 to 'die early' despite its large market share Picture 2
Banner encourages IE6 users to switch to newer browsers on YouTube.

It is almost impossible for developers to make the code changes they want. However, when developers from the early days of YouTube, before being acquired by Google for $ 1.65 billion, had the privilege of making changes without censorship.

Since almost no one at YouTube uses IE6, this group believes that if the changes they make do not significantly affect the display interface of the site, their jobs will not be detected soon. .

And yes, it is not until two days after the banner above appears that their jobs are discovered. A senior YouTube manager said he received the question, why YouTube threatened to destroy a browser with such a significant market share from media around the world.

Subsequently, two Google lawyers also went to the group to find out why YouTube unintentionally made the announcement. At the same time, they also asked the group to lower the banner for fear that Google Chrome might violate European competition laws.

YouTube itself is the 'culprit' that has caused Internet Explorer 6 to 'die early' despite its large market share Picture 3

Not long after, a similar banner appeared on Google Docs when opened with IE6 because it thought this was accepted by senior management.

In fact, the Google leadership team will never accept that change, but because the banner has been included in most of its products, they have to be silent as a result. Not only that, Google has allowed all other websites to add that banner. This leaves half of YouTube users on IE6 and IE6's global bandwidth abruptly dropped by more than 10% within a month and of course all other browsers increase accordingly.