This month I want to highlight a blog post, A Conspiracy To Kill IE6, by Chris Zacharias. This is a fascinating story that is fraught with good and bad lessons. Chris details the developer pain associated with supporting IE6, and their non-sanctioned plan to deprecate support. There are so many actions in this article that a development team should never do, yet by ignoring all of those guidelines the YouTube team led the charge on upgrading IE6 customers to more modern browsers.

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

“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.”