Forget Shopping, Friday Is Update Your Parents' Browser Day!
Thanksgiving is coming up, that time when families gather together to share food, extend gratitude, and marvel at how Dad still uses Internet Explorer 6. No, seriously, Dad, how can you be using a browser developed during the Clinton administration?
Context & Ripple Effects
IE6 has been a running industry cleanup project for years: Digg campaigned against it back in 2009, and Google's answer was to bypass it entirely with Chrome Frame, effectively turning IE into Chrome. By March 2011 Microsoft itself was publicly counting down IE6's declining usage share, yet the browser still held on.
The Atlantic's Thanksgiving framing adds a new lever to that campaign: instead of enterprise IT mandates or vendor shims, it recruits families — the one group with physical access to the holdout machines — making browser retirement a holiday chore rather than a corporate program.
First-order effects
- Households that act on it immediately move relatives off IE6 onto modern browsers, chipping away at the residual usage share Microsoft was still tracking down in 2011.
- Microsoft gains most directly: upgrades pushed by family members land users on newer Internet Explorer versions rather than necessarily switching them to Chrome or Firefox.
Second-order effects
- Web developers and site operators get closer to dropping IE6-specific code paths and testing, retiring maintenance cost that the 2009-era workarounds existed to avoid.
- Google's Chrome-installer strategy loses some urgency for the consumer segment, since a socially driven upgrade wave reaches machines that download prompts never did.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, legacy-browser retirement shifts from vendor and IT enforcement to social norm — security hygiene becoming something families do for each other, which shortens the long tail of obsolete software faster than enterprise policies alone.
- That same dynamic points toward browsers being treated as consumable infrastructure rather than set-and-forget desktop fixtures, raising expectations for automatic updates across consumer software.
The trend: Browser obsolescence is increasingly fought through cultural and social pressure — countdowns, campaigns, and now family holidays — rather than technical forcing functions alone.