Much Ado About IE6
Here at Digg, like most sites, the designers, developers, and QA engineers spend a lot of time making sure the site works in IE6, an eight-year-old browser superseded by two full releases. It consumes time that could be spent building the future of Digg.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post lands mid-arc for Digg. Through 2008 the company absorbed an analyst argument that its golden days were over, and an unconfirmed report that it had hired Allen & Co. to explore a sale; in April 2009 the DiggBar rollout triggered publisher outcry severe enough that Digg retreated within weeks and restricted the toolbar to logged-in users.
Seen against that run of setbacks, 'Much Ado About IE6' reads less like a technical gripe than a statement of resource priorities: with two full Internet Explorer releases having superseded the browser, Digg is publicly pricing what eight-year-old compatibility costs its own roadmap — the same new-feature pipeline critics said was stalled.
First-order effects
- Digg's designers, developers and QA engineers keep absorbing a recurring per-release tax on an eight-year-old browser — confirmed effort diverted from exactly the feature work the DiggBar backlash showed the company needed to land cleanly.
- Microsoft inherits a visible, named complainant among high-traffic sites: every Digg-style accounting of IE6's maintenance cost makes the browser's holdout user base more expensive for Microsoft politically, even before any site acts.
Second-order effects
- Peer publishers get a prominent precedent for their own support decisions — if a site of Digg's scale voices the cost openly, other engineering leads can cite it internally when arguing to cut IE6 certification from their QA matrices.
- Enterprise and older-Windows users pinned to IE6 become the exposed party: as first-tier sites degrade or drop support, their browsing experience breaks ahead of any Microsoft-driven upgrade push.
Third-order effects
- If enough major publishers act on this same math, legacy-browser support shifts from each site's private engineering cost to a coordinated market signal — the mechanism that historically compressed browser upgrade cycles and eroded Microsoft's backward-compatibility veto over what the web could ship.
The trend: Web publishing is moving from quietly subsidizing legacy browsers to publicly pricing their maintenance cost, letting individual sites force the pace of browser adoption that Microsoft once controlled alone.