The bittersweet consequence of YouTube’s incredible growth is that so many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint. This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small team of web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and got away with it.

If you can get somebody to copy your decision fast enough, you can just claim you were copying them...

Shortly thereafter, the Google Docs engineers whipped up their own IE6 banner and pushed it into production, presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals. The first time many Googlers heard chatter about IE6 banners was from email threads where other teams had begun asking if they could deprecate IE6 like Google Docs had. Luck would have it that this had included many of our managers. Amazingly, we had somehow bypassed detection as the originators of the IE6 banner inside of Google.

source: L