YouTube dropping IE6 support — At more than a week old, I suppose this doesn’t qualify as breaking news, but it’s still big news. According to Ars Technica, YouTube will cease to support Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 beginning March 13, 2010—that’s right, less than two weeks from today. To the delight of CHNM’s web developers, many schools, libraries, and cultural institutions have already started to transition away from IE6, though not as quickly as any of us would like. The decision to stop supporting the nearly decade old browser by one of students’ favorite websites will hopefully serve a further forcing function.
Like “Pin Tab” in Chrome? Try “App Tabs” for Firefox — One of my favorite things about Google Chrome is the “pin tab” feature, which allows users to keep frequently used web pages and applications “pinned” at the top left of the tabs toolbar. Now the App Tabs extension brings this same functionality to Firefox. Unfortunately, the extension doesn’t work with very many themes, so if you give it a try you may also want to download Strata40, which seems to handle it well. Both add-ons have been written in anticipation of Firefox 4.0, which is due at the end of this year and will include features and design elements of each.
re: the death of IE6, Google dropping its support on YouTube may have a limited impact in public schools and government offices where sites like YouTube are already blocked. With that said, I look forward to IE6’s demise.
@dave – That’s a good point. Hopefully, however, if large swathes of the Internet (such as Google’s other properties) follow suit, even schools will have to take note. Thanks for the comment!