IE 6

In early 2000 Internet Explorer 5 was the best browser on the market. It rendered pages pretty well, had a nice interface and was fast. IE6 was released soon afterwards with a few relatively minor fixes and cemented IE’s stranglehold on the web browser market.

Fast-forward to today and Internet Explorer has become the bane of any forward-thinking web designer’s existance. With the onset of advanced CSS layout techniques, IE6’s rendering engine has been exposed as buggy and unreliable. IE is years behind the times — CSS properties that are well supported in Gecko-based browsers, like Firefox, aren’t even on the radar for IE, and probably won’t be for another few years, when the long-delayed next version of Windows appears.

To get down to brass tacks, IE6 supports most of each of the standards: HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, JavaScript, the DOM Level 1 and CSS-1. A genuine attempt at CSS-2 support is sadly lacking, especially since IE5 on the Mac has excellent support for it.

Explorer is an average browser. The interface is still good and it’s relatively speedy when rendering web pages, but its lack of support for CSS specifications that were standardised in 1998 is a huge problem. It is prone to crashing, and has hundreds of security holes which allow spyware to get onto your system, to the point where I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore. Upgrade to another browser listed on this page, and encourage others to do likewise.f

IE 7

After a long hiatus after Internet Explorer 6 was released, Microsoft finally got shunted out of complacence in the browser market by the threat posed by new upstart browsers like Firefox and Safari. IE7 is a great improvement over its predecessor, with much improved standards support. It has also caught up on the other browsers in terms of features like tabbed browsing and intelligent popup blocking. Firefox is still my favourite browser, but IE7 ain’t half bad.