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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

Take it away from the specific case of IE6, and consider the situation where you have a product team that says one thing and a team of engineers insist on their solution.

They got lucky, IE6 in that sense was ready to die, and they basically declared mutiny with good cause.

Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particular set up a system to subvert their own company.

They even said it themselves: Legal shit their pants because they tried it and saw Chrome as the first suggestion. They were lucky that the media didn't capitalise on that if they got the same ordering.

This story with Youtube and IE6 is romantic. It's not realistic or aspirational. Besides which, we would not hear of it if the attempt failed.

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> They got lucky, IE6 in that sense was ready to die, and they basically declared mutiny with good cause.

Ok, and if IE6 had not been ready to die, what kind of catastrophe would have ensued?

> Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particular set up a system to subvert their own company.

I can imagine catastrophes. But they're mostly the sorts of catastrophes that are bad for an organization, but great for a civilization.

> This story with Youtube and IE6 is romantic. It's not realistic or aspirational. Besides which, we would not hear of it if the attempt failed.

Something we don't hear about if it fails, but produces a great social benefit if it succeeds seems like exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.

No catastrophe would have ensued. They didn't remove support for IE6. They put up a banner telling IE6 users that support would be removed some time in the future. Only taking the second step (actually removing support) would have any consequences. If a large, powerful contingent demanded that IE6 support be kept indefinitely and persuaded management of this, the banner would have been removed.

With drive following in their footsteps a catastrophe really could have ensued - drive was at that point (I believe? It was a long time ago) already being marketed as good for organizations - any organization stuck with IE6 for stupid corporate reasons may have decided the potential for the site to suddenly stop working was too risky and immediately started migrating to a competitor that offered long term support.

I think a difficulty seeing a catastrophic is because YouTube is not valuable to businesses[1] and when your income source is more distributed (no large contracts) there are less chances to really shoot yourself in the foot. You have to piss off all your customers in a way that - really - you should probably see coming.

[1] I don't mean to deride the service, but it didn't have any commercial tie ins at this point worth mentioning, stuff like professional streamers and hosted partnerships with IP holders came later, at this point they were interesting in pop-culture but not a tool for making money.

IE6 was ready to die the moment it was born. This story boils down to some influential developers saying "Fuck this shit" and doing something about it, taking most of the industry with them.

Given that IE6 was one of the worst pieces of software in all of human history, there was never likely to be a significant downside.

That is untrue. When IE6 first arrived it was on par with Mac IE 5.2 in terms of web standards support. It was a great browser for its time.

The problem with IE6 is Microsoft declaring victory in the Browser war with Netscape, and IE6 development stopped. For years until Firefox and Chrome threatened Microsoft's browser dominance.

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