YouTube Dropping Support for IE6, But Will it Help Drop IE6 Usage?

      by Wyatt Walter

News has broken out on the web today that support for IE6 on YouTube is going away. It seems that other sites will be soon to follow as well. A fairly certain one is digg.com. As Digg reports, a small chunk of their traffic is still IE6, but very few actual diggs are coming from IE6 users. While I’m certainly not going to suggest that dropping support for IE6 is a bad thing (let the poor thing die), but I am fairly certain that it won’t have the effect that people are wanting. Unless sites besides social networking sites are going to drop support for IE6, we won’t see a mass exodus from the browser.

Digg released the results of its survey a few days ago about why their users aren’t leaving IE6. Guess what? Most of the users are using IE6 because they have to. According to the results, 32% of IE6 users say that they haven’t upgraded because they are told they can’t and 37% haven’t because they don’t have administrative access to their PCs. That means that 69% of IE6 users are using it because they have to.

Why are these users being forced to use IE6? That’s a question that has several answers, but I will tell you this: I wouldn’t expect the lack of support for YouTube or Digg at work to do anything for IE6 users in their fight to get an upgraded browser in their workplace. I can see that conversation going horribly wrong for any employee requesting a browser upgrade so they can watch YouTube videos at work.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 14th, 2009

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