Brennan’s Blog

Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001. Now 5 years later we are finally getting a new release with corrections for rendering bugs among other changes. I believe the fact that we have waited so long for a fresh release has been both good and bad.

It has been good since we have not had to continually adapt to a new release while attempting to cope with bugs in older versions. IE6 has become the devil we know. Those of us who have developed websites the past 5 years are intimately familiar with the quirks of IE6. You can even view a list of known bugs with suggested workarounds to help you resolve those difficult problems. This content has been collected over time based on experiments done by independent web developers. Occasionally Microsoft has helped develop workarounds with organizations like WaSP.

It has also been good because a considerable amount of common ground between IE6, Firefox and Safari has been fostered. With IE6 accounting for the strong majority of user traffic on the web, website developers focused on using features supported by that dominant browser. As Netscape melted away and Firefox grew out of Mozilla, those commonly used features were given a priority over unsupported and obscure CSS features. Today most sites look identical in IE6, Firefox and Mozilla. That is no accident. The fact that IE6 has stood still so long has allowed Firefox and Safari to match and exceed the support that IE6 has provided. Now we have more common ground than would have been possible if IE was a moving target the past 5 years.

Ironically, IE6 has had strong Javascript/DOM support, including a proprietary ActiveX control called XmlHttpRequest which has recently become an "innovative" feature which is central to the buzz which has become known as Web 2.0. When the value of this ActiveX object became apparent support for it in Firefox and Safari took off. These browsers were able to leverage this proprietary IE6 feature. As a part of making IE7 more secure, this XmlHttpRequest object is now a Javascript object instead of an ActiveX control. It should continue to work as it did before but to ensure it does, I always use a wrapper like the Prototype Javascript Framework which handles such messy details for me.

The bad part of having to wait so long for the dominant browser to support modern standards is that you must really push the limits of what that browser can do and then work within those limits. What is planned and not fully implemented for CSS2 and CSS3 will give us some of what is taken for granted in other media formats, such as print. A simple feature like multiple columns would make content so much more readable.

It is also frustrating to be forced to cope with rendering bugs for so long. I have attempted to employ clever CSS techniques to achieve powerful user interface enhancements but have had to scale back those efforts when I discovered Internet Explorer had a bug specific to the technique I was attempting. I am glad that many of the bugs I have experienced are going away with IE7. Unfortunately we know the scope of IE7 did not include everything we know is broken in IE6, so we have more waiting to do.

At least seems that IE7 is heading in the right direction and I hope IE6 is soon a distant memory.