It has been found that in 2009, YouTube employees planned a way to kill Internet Explorer 6. Apparently, this was done so that the web developers can stop supporting the old Internet Explorer 6. This has been revealed by a former Google employee named Chris Zacharias. He claims that this plan was laid out in the YouTube cafeteria. At a coffee break, some YouTube employees were fantasizing how they can kill Internet Explorer. They got the idea of putting up a banner inside YouTube to threaten the users. The banner read that Internet Explorer 6’s support for YouTube is phasing out.
However, there was no such plan to stop support for Internet Explorer 6. It was just a plot by YouTube employees to force users to switch to other browsers. At that time, YouTube was acquired by Google but the company had not totally integrated the platform in its systems. So it was easier for employees to write that code into production.
Also, Chris claims that just the YouTube employees used to open YouTube in Internet Explorer 6 at that time. So the banner was not seen by anyone in testing except the users who browsed YouTube from the browser. The team was contemplating how that change would be taken by its users. However, the publications later published this as being the change that the internet needed. Most of the publications claimed that the YouTube team was helping in making a faster and better internet.
At that time, Google Chrome, Firefox and even Internet Explorer 8 had been released. So users were able to switch to browsers of their choice. They could even update their existing browser to switch to the latest version. Chris also claims that Google’s PR Team lead came running to their desks due to this but they were saved because the change was received positively by the media.