> I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right? It turned out to be beneficial but there are thousands of ways that this could explode in your face if you tried it yourself.
How would this explode in your face, exactly? What was the risk here?
The risk could be that a competitor could step into the market and use "legacy support" as a positive of their platform. Youtube is weird - especially at that time - since it didn't really have any movers and shakers in terms of either consumers or producers, but if they were selling software that corporations legitimately use (for instance - vimeo offers good streaming video embeds that do "things" to try and restrict the video to a limited audience) then a company using this service to host their streaming videos may be motivated to shift off of that service to a competitor that won't artificially limit the users that can actually use this third party plugin.
Again, it's a bit hard to say here with YouTube in particular, because it isn't a place where work happened at that point[1] so none of the consumers wielded significant power - honestly YouTube may have been fine just say "Welp, 18% of our user base is forcing us into supporting janky old browsers - guess we're losing 18% of our user base and saving a bunch on code maintenance."
[1] Now there are streamers that may legitimately threaten the company if they threaten to jump ship, it's economically weird but beside the point... just, back then there was nothing.
All that said... I had to work with ie6, it is terrible, and these people are heroes.
The most awful thing that could happen to 2006-era YouTube: they could stop delivering ad impressions for an hour or two. Oh wait, no; 2006-era YouTube didn't even have ads yet.
They got lucky, IE6 in that sense was ready to die, and they basically declared mutiny with good cause.
Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particular set up a system to subvert their own company.
They even said it themselves: Legal shit their pants because they tried it and saw Chrome as the first suggestion. They were lucky that the media didn't capitalise on that if they got the same ordering.
This story with Youtube and IE6 is romantic. It's not realistic or aspirational. Besides which, we would not hear of it if the attempt failed.
Ok, and if IE6 had not been ready to die, what kind of catastrophe would have ensued?
> Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particular set up a system to subvert their own company.
I can imagine catastrophes. But they're mostly the sorts of catastrophes that are bad for an organization, but great for a civilization.
> This story with Youtube and IE6 is romantic. It's not realistic or aspirational. Besides which, we would not hear of it if the attempt failed.
Something we don't hear about if it fails, but produces a great social benefit if it succeeds seems like exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.
Given that IE6 was one of the worst pieces of software in all of human history, there was never likely to be a significant downside.
for one thing that actually happened because they did (and got away) with this: youtube engineers feel like they can leverage their site to dictate what they want in the browser space, by deliberately making it 5x slower on firefox and edge[0].
As a rule of thumb, if something looks fishy and shady, but just because it doesn't directly explodes in your face, treat it as a "but I don't have anything to hide" situation, and be against it. Because eventually, it will be your face.
[0] http://fortune.com/2018/07/25/youtube-slow-mozilla-firefox-c...
There's no evidence that that was deliberate. These two things are also pretty completely unrelated.
