14 DAY TRIAL // Hot on the trail of social link aggregator Digg, YouTube may also be dropping support for the aging Internet Explorer 6 browser. While there is no official date – there isn't any official comment at all actually – users who still have to work with IE 6 are getting a message suggesting they should update to a modern browser.
“We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one of these modern browsers,” the notice IE 6 users are getting says. For YouTube modern browsers means Google Chrome (coincidently or not, the first option), Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5. We don't know how soon is “soon” but considering that IE 6 is now 8 years old and plagued with incompatibility problems and non-standard web page rendering and has been the bane of many web developers for years it can't be soon enough. As a side note, YouTube was already pushing Google Chrome as an alternative asking users to “try YouTube in a new web browser” so now Internet Explorer 6 users will be getting two links to download Chrome on the same page very close to each other actually.
Internet Explorer has seen its fair share of vulnerabilities and security problems coupled with the lack of standards support and the lack of many basic features all recent browsers sport, including newer releases of Internet Explorer, so you would think the 8-year-old browser would have died out by now but for a number of reasons many users can't or won't upgrade, leaving IE 6 with about 10 percent browser market share even today. The most common reasons why some still use IE 6 is because their workplace won't allow them to update or because of older hardware.
The popular link aggregator Digg also announced it would stop supporting IE 6 for the most advanced functions of the site like digging, burying or commenting, citing that, while 10 percent of Digg users still have IE 6, only 1 percent of those are active on the site, i.e. do more than just follow the site.