“We began collectively fantasizing about how we could exact our revenge on IE6,” reveals Chris Zacharias, a former Google and YouTube engineer. “The plan was very simple. We would put a small banner above the video player that would only show up for IE6 users.” A group of engineers implemented this banner, knowing that most YouTube employees using the company’s staging environment wouldn’t even see it. At the time, Google had acquired YouTube a few years prior to the IE6 banner and the video sharing site hadn’t really fully adapted to Google’s infrastructure and policies.

The banner spread to other Google properties. The Google Docs team added a similar message warning about IE6 support. “One of their engineers testing in IE6 had noticed the YouTube banner pretty shortly after it went live and immediately took it to their manager as evidence as to why they should do the same,” explains Zacharias. Google internal chatter centered on the Docs team adding the IE6 banner, so the original YouTube engineering team “somehow bypassed detection as the originators of the IE6 banner inside of Google.”

The result was a massive dip in Internet Explorer 6 traffic to YouTube. “Within one month, our YouTube IE6 user base was cut in half and over 10 percent of global IE6 traffic had dropped off while all other browsers increased in corresponding amounts,” says Zacharias. “The results were better than our web development team had ever intended.”

http://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Whole story is engineered by Google lawyers, most probably due to some real proving leak, to make Google not responsible and present it as some guys personal thingy.