https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

 
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May 1, 2019

A Conspiracy To Kill IE6

The bittersweet consequence of YouTube's incredible growth is that so
many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint.
This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small
team of web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and
got away with it.

I do not recall the exact triggering event that led to our web
development team laying out plans to kill IE6 over lunch in the
YouTube cafeteria. Perhaps it was the time I pushed out a CSS
stylesheet that included an attribute selector on a semi-supported
HTML element. Any reasonable web developer would expect this to be
ignored by browsers not up to the task. This was not the case with
older flavors of IE. Under very specific conditions, an attribute
selector on an unsupported HTML element in IE would create an
internal recursion that would at best, cause the browser to crash and
at worst, trigger a blue screen of death. Or perhaps it was the
hundredth time one of our software engineers had innocently pushed
out an <img> tag with an empty src attribute. Nobody joining the team
could be expected to know that in early versions of IE, the browser
would load the root path "/" for empty src attributes. The <img> tag
would suddenly behave like an <iframe>, loading our homepage and all
of its dependent resources in what could become an exponentially
expanding recursive loop. Whenever an empty image tag found its way
on to the homepage, it was all-hands-on-deck emergency to locate and
replace the offending code before we melted our servers into
paperweights.

Regardless of whatever the event at that time was, it had been brutal
and it had been IE6 related. IE6 had been the bane of our web
development team's existence. At least one to two weeks every major
sprint cycle had to be dedicated to fixing new UI that was breaking
in IE6. Despite this pain, we were told we had to continue supporting
IE6 because our users might be unable to upgrade or might be working
at companies that were locked in. IE6 users represented around 18% of
our user base at that point. We understood that we could not just
drop support for it. However, sitting in that cafeteria, having only
slept about a few hours each in the previous days, our compassion for
these users had completely eroded away. We began collectively
fantasizing about how we could exact our revenge on IE6. One idea
rose to the surface that quickly captured everyone's attention.
Instead of outright dropping IE6 support, what if we just threatened
to? How would users react? Would they revolt against YouTube? Would
they mail death threats to our team like had happened in the past? Or
would they suddenly become loud advocates of modern browsers? We
openly daydreamed about cubicle workers around the world suddenly
inventing creative "business" reasons for needing upgraded browsers.
Grandparents would hold their technically savvy grand-kids hostage,
demanding they fix their "YouTubes". What had begun as a team therapy
session started to materialize into an actual plan, a plan we quickly
realized we were uniquely positioned to execute on.

The plan was very simple. We would put a small banner above the video
player that would only show up for IE6 users. It would read "We will
be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one
of these more modern browsers." Next to the text would be links to
the current versions of the major browsers, including Chrome,
Firefox, IE8 and eventually, Opera. The text was intentionally vague
and the timeline left completely undefined. We hoped that it was
threatening enough to motivate end users to upgrade without forcing
us to commit to any actual deprecation plan. Users would have the
ability to close out this warning if they wanted to ignore it or deal
with it later. The code was designed to be as subtle as possible so
that it would not catch the attention of anyone monitoring our
checkins. Nobody except the web development team used IE6 with any
real regularity, so we knew it was unlikely anyone would notice our
banner appear in the staging environment. We even delayed having the
text translated for international users so that a translator asking
for additional context could not inadvertently surface what we were
doing. Next, we just needed a way to slip the code into production
without anyone catching on.

YouTube IE6 Deprecation Banner

The IE6 Deprecation Banner on YouTube in 2009

It turned out that a handful of us had entered YouTube at an
interesting time... several months after YouTube had been acquired by
Google but before Google had begun deeply integrating YouTube into
their larger organization. The early YouTube engineers were
rightfully territorial and initially hesitant to adapt to Google's
infrastructure and norms. With their penchants for gray-hat hacking,
fast cars, and hard whiskey and an uncommon number of piercings,
tattoos, and minor arrest records, many had been rejected during
previous Google interviews. Ending up at YouTube instead, they found
themselves breaking their backs to stay ahead of exponentially
growing traffic while having to constantly defend against critics
explaining how Google Video would imminently kill them. By the time
they were acquired into Google, many of these engineers had come to
view their outcast identity as a critical component of their eventual
success.

To cement their authority over the YouTube codebase during the
integration into Google, the early engineers created a specialized
permission set called "OldTuber". OldTuber granted you the ability to
completely bypass the new Google-oriented code enforcement policies,
enabling anyone holding it to commit code directly to the YouTube
codebase, with only the most glancing of code reviews from anyone. No
need for code readability. No need for exhaustive tests. No need for
maintaining code coverage. If you broke the site by improperly
wielding OldTuber status, it was on your head and you would lose the
privilege immediately, if not your job. So you just had to be a good
citizen and never break the site. Our boss, an early YouTube engineer
himself, had gone out of his way to ingratiate the web development
team with the rest of the early YouTube engineers. Through his
efforts, a couple of us eventually found ourselves in possession of
OldTuber status, despite never having been a part of the original
team. It was like we were just walking down the street when someone
mistook us for valets and handed us the keys to their Ferrari. For
better or for worse, we were not exactly the types to just hand the
keys back and walk away. We saw an opportunity in front of us to
permanently cripple IE6 that we might never get again. If this went
at all wrong, a number of us would surely be fired. Our most renegade
web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on
checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor,
and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code
review. The code merged into production and our banner went live a
few days later.

The first person to come by our desks was the PR team lead. He was a
smart, dapper man who was always bubbling with energy and enthusiasm.
Except this time. This time he was uncharacteristically prickly. He
had come in on an otherwise normal day to find email from every major
tech news publication asking why the second largest website on the
planet was threatening to cut off access to nearly a fifth of its
user base. Fortunately for us, the publications had already settled
on a narrative that this was a major benefit to the Internet. By
their call, YouTube was leading the charge towards making the web a
faster, safer experience for all of its users. The entire PR team had
Macs running Chrome and could not even see what we had done, let
alone issue comments to the press on any of it. They were caught
completely unaware. We eagerly told them everything about what we had
launched and helped them craft the necessary talking points to expand
on the narrative already established by the media. Satisfied that he
could get back in front of the story, the PR team lead turned and
warned us to never do anything like this without telling him first.
He did not want to let great public relations opportunities like this
slip by ever again.

Next came the lawyers. Two senior lawyers sprinted over to our desks
in a state of buttoned-down panic. They immediately demanded that we
remove the banner. We explained how we would need the SREs to do an
emergency push and that it would take at least a few hours to do.
Frustrated, one of the lawyers asked "Why did you have to put Chrome
first?" Confused, I explained that we did not give any priority to
Chrome. Our boss, in on the conspiracy with us, had thoughtfully
recommended that we randomize the order of the browsers listed and
then cookie the random seed for each visitor so that the UI would not
jump around between pages, which we had done. As luck would have it,
these two lawyers still used IE6 to access certain legacy systems and
had both ended up with random seeds that placed Chrome in the first
position. Their fear was that by showing preferential treatment to
Chrome, we might prick the ears of European regulators already on the
lookout for any anti-competitive behavior. While the lawyers conceded
that nothing we had done would have likely risen to that level of
offense, it had happened on their watch and they did not appreciate
that. I repeatedly cleared the cookies in my copy of IE6 and showed
the browsers reshuffling with each refresh. Content with the
demonstration, the lawyers quickly retreated back to their desks
without any further concerns.

I expected the next people to be the engineering managers and that
they would be the angriest given how clearly we had abused our
OldTuber status. Suspiciously, nobody came by that day. The next day,
a handful of engineers stopped by to congratulate us on the launch of
the banner after reading articles around the Internet, but that was
it. I asked my boss if he was getting any blowback and he shrugged,
indicating that nobody had pulled him aside yet. It seemed that for
the moment we were in the clear. Surprised and unable to make sense
of this, I probed one of the managers about what he thought about the
banner launching. He responded "Oh, I just figured you guys copied
the banner that Google Docs had put up." I was confused. How could
Google Docs have beaten us to the punch on this? I opened up Google
Docs in IE6 and sure enough, a banner very much like ours was showing
at the top. It implored their users to upgrade to avoid breaking
features in terms similarly vague to ours.

I had met a few engineers on the Google Docs team while working on
some shared Javascript libraries. I reached out to one and asked how
they had arrived at the decision to launch their own banner. He
explained to me that they had been wanting to deprecate IE6 support
for a long time but their managers would not let them for the same
reasons we had always heard. One of their engineers testing in IE6
had noticed the YouTube banner pretty shortly after it went live and
immediately took it to their manager as evidence as to why they
should do the same. Shortly thereafter, the Google Docs engineers
whipped up their own IE6 banner and pushed it into production,
presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our
diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals. The first
time many Googlers heard chatter about IE6 banners was from email
threads where other teams had begun asking if they could deprecate
IE6 like Google Docs had. Luck would have it that this had included
many of our managers. Amazingly, we had somehow bypassed detection as
the originators of the IE6 banner inside of Google.

Eventually the YouTube engineering management did ask themselves how
the decision to deprecate IE6 was ultimately made, given it happened
so quickly and seemed conspicuously premature for a media site of our
scale and with such a wide user base. Once they realized what had
happened, they cornered our boss for details, grappled with the
consequences of our actions and begrudgingly arrived at the
conclusion that the ends had justified the means. Between YouTube,
Google Docs, and several other Google properties posting IE6 banners,
Google had given permission to every other site on the web to add
their own. IE6 banners suddenly started appearing everywhere. Within
one month, our YouTube IE6 user base was cut in half and over 10% of
global IE6 traffic had dropped off while all other browsers increased
in corresponding amounts. The results were better than our web
development team had ever intended.

Historical IE6 browser share

The Historical Share of Different IE Browser Versions (https://
www.w3counter.com/trends)

We somehow got away with our plan to kill IE6 without facing any
meaningful corrective action. Few people even knew we were involved
at all and those that did, did not want to bring attention to it or
risk encouraging similar behavior. At a beer garden in San Francisco,
our boss, winking his hardest, made us swear to never do anything
like this again. We agreed, toasted IE6 falling into single digit
percentages, and never snuck anything into production again.

 
 
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