Ars Technica: Ex-YouTube engineer reveals how video site worked to kill off Internet Explorer 6

Ars Technica: Ex-YouTube engineer reveals how video site worked to kill off Internet Explorer 6. “Though YouTube had been under Google’s ownership for about three years, YouTube’s engineers were suspicious and wary of being integrated into Google’s corporate machine. They had their own special set of permissions named ‘OldTuber,’ and anyone with OldTuber permissions could freely modify the YouTube site without going through Google’s usual change management process of code reviews, testing, adherence to coding standards, and so on. It was cowboy territory, where developers could do as they liked. Only the risk of breaking things—and hence losing OldTuber permissions, if not their job—kept them on the straight and narrow. The OldTubers decided that they’d show a banner to Internet Explorer 6 users.”