YouTube Did Try To Kill Internet Explorer 6

Chris Zacharias, a former Google and YouTube engineer, has revealed that  YouTube engineers once attempted to kill Internet Explorer 6 about 10 years ago.

On Saturday, The Verge published a study said that users of Internet Explorer 6 received alerts with the content that Microsoft's browser would soon be "phasing out".

It should be noted that in 2006, Google made a deal with YouTube for a $1.65-billion takeover.

A group of engineers were disappointed and frustrated by the support of the old browser, they together devised ways to take revenge on Internet Explorer 6. However, the plan is not too dangerous or complicated. They planned to place a warning panel above the video player for users when they use Microsoft's browser.

At that time, only 18% of people accessed YouTube via IE6. Their notifications have appeared on all YouTube pages opened on this browser.

Of course, they cannot arbitrarily do this because it violates Google's code enforcement policy. Therefore, they created a special right for themselves with the name "OldTuber". It allows them to directly change the code base on YouTube and the code is supposed to restrict use.

Zacharias said it had the chance to make IE6 completely paralyzed and could never recover.

Later, two Google lawyers questioned how YouTube displayed the banner. And the company asked the team to remove the banner as soon as they found out.

Lawyers were very worried about EU regulations on anti-competitive behavior. That was the time when Chrome was being promoted. Many people believe that it will be an alternative browser with more features and more powerful processing capabilities. The actions of engineers can bring Chrome into trouble.

However, YouTube's engineers are equally shy. They set up random display banners on all other browsers like Internet Explorer 8, Opera, Firefox.

As a result, the number of visitors to IE6 into YouTube dropped significantly. After only one month of displaying the banner, the number of YouTube visitors on Internet Explorer 6 has decreased by half. Furthermore, Microsoft's old browser traffic is down 10%, while the number of visitors to other browsers has increased.

Currently, Google Chrome, a Google-owned browser is the top one with the highest number of active users every day. It was released for Windows XP for the first time in September 2008.