YouTube To End Support For IE6

YouTube, that bastion of wasted work hours, is terminating support for IE6.  I can only join in the giant chorus of "WOOHOO!!"

IE6 use needs to be abolished.  It is a thorn in the side of any web developer who is trying to create a standards based web site simply because it is not a standards compliant browser.  On any given design project that require support for IE6 and any other browser, there's an added 15-50% increase in time (depending on the complexity of the site in general and how many of the IE hacks that need to be implemented).  And that's completely wasted time.

IE6 gained dominance simply because it came pre-installed on Windows (and led to many anti trust suits against Microsoft).  Of  course, it also helped that the main competitor to IE at the time was Netscape Navigator, which was, to say the least, slow and bloated.  Then FireFox entered the picture and Microsoft, after 5 years of stagnation in the web browser market, suddenly got up and released a new, more standards compliant browser, IE7, followed by an even better browser 3 years later, IE8.

FireFox is still my browser of choice (although I have IE6,7,8, Chrome and Safari on various Virtual machines for testing), but IE8 has come a long way from IE6 by way of web standards (not to mention adding a lot of features that FF has) and so I don't rant about people not using IE anymore (leaving it more as a personal preference...each browser has its good points and bad points). 

So with youtube.com no longer supporting IE6 and other sites like Digg doing the same, hopefully it will become a faded memory. A painful, shameful, faded memory