A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019)
A lot of folks have wondered why IE 6 stuck around so long in the first place. It’s pretty simple: group policy. Through Active Directory, admins could do things like force a specific homepage, set proxies for all browsers in the company, disable media features for security, make history undeletable, or even turn off right clicking. Around that time there weren’t alternatives to set these policies in other browsers, so admins just disabled the ability to install them in order to maintain tight control. Now Chrome and possibly other browsers can do similar, but less draconian policies, and security concerns are mitigated with separate systems.<p>After the time this article references, there started to be big changes around how corporate IT was managed. It went from being about gear and gate-keeping to strategically supporting business initiatives. I wonder if this little banner on the YouTube player helped nudge things forward.