Taking joy from simple news: IE6 and Youtube

Anyone who has anything even remotely to do with web development will be smiling at the news that Youtube is going to discontinue support for IE6.

Not only that, we’ve got a date. 13th of March, 2010.

While this isn’t really the end, it will certainly put that little bit more pressure on the roughly 15-20% of internet users who still cling to the 9 year old version of Internet Explorer for various reasons I fail to fully comprehend.

You can read more about this on mashable.com or techcrunch.com as they do a much better job than me of writing about such things.

There’s even a response from Microsoft if you so wish to expand your mind.

Having worked in a corporate IT environment I fail to see how even the most lethargic of firms could take 5 years to update the web browser in the modern business environment. Unless you’re talking line of business PC’s in a secure network, but then those PC’s shouldn’t be afflicting their attempts at html rendering on the web development community.

I thought when Facebook stopped explicitly supporting the nearly decade old browser in 2008 that we’d seen then end of it. Then Microsoft shattered the hopes of many geeks, confirming support would continue into 2014.

With Youtube being the number 3 site on the web I’m going to take a punt and say that at least some of the 15% will be getting the message loud and clear soon that it’s time to update their PC.

Note from future self: There were a few links in this post when I migrated that were broken, so I nuked them.