At one time, Internet Explorer 6 was very popular. It's hard to believe, but 10 years ago it occupied a fifth of the market. It was used both in Russia and abroad, mainly by government agencies, banks and similar organizations. And it seemed that the “six” would never end. However, YouTube hastened his death. And without approval from management.
Ex-employee of the company Chris Zacharias (Chris Zacharias) , as he unwittingly became the "gravedigger" of the popular browser. He said that in 2009, many web developers were unhappy with Internet Explorer 6, because it required them to create their own versions of sites. But the leadership of the major portals ignored this. And then the team of YouTube engineers decided to act on their own.
The bottom line is, the developers added a small banner that the system only showed in IE6. He reported that the user was using an old browser and offered to update it to the versions that were current at that time. At the same time, they were sure that their actions would go unnoticed. The fact is that the old YouTube developers had privileges that allowed them to make changes to the service without approval. They survived even after Google acquired the video service. Also, almost no one at YouTube was using Internet Explorer 6.
However, two days later, the head of the public relations department reached out to them, as users began to report about the banner. And while some wrote panic letters on the topic “When Internet Explorer 6 will end”, others supported YouTube as a conductor of new and more secure browsers. And the company's lawyers only clarified whether the banner violates antitrust rules, after which they calmed down.
The most interesting began later. The management learned that the engineers acted without approval, but at that time Google Docs and other Google services had already implemented this banner in their products. And employees of other divisions of the search giant sincerely believed that the YouTube team simply copied the implementation from Google Docs. Finally, other non-search resources began to copy this idea, after which the abandonment of Internet Explorer 6 was only a matter of time.