…Half a dozen of the other
When I said in the last article that release of Internet Explorer 6 was imminent, I didn’t expect it to arrive within the week. But here it is, all shiny and new — well, actually, all grey and looking exactly like IE5. Hmm.
There is a difference, but it took me a while to spot it. The MSN button is gone and is replaced by a “media” button. In other words, a button I didn’t use has been replaced by a button I won’t use. As far as I can see, IE6 shuts out any media player other than Windows Media Player (and it wants you to upgrade to version 7). Yeah, I really want to watch streamed media that looks as though it has been painted by a blind impressionist.
As far as page rendering goes — well, plus ça change. Most pages I looked at were not rendered any differently from the way IE5.5 would have done it. IE6 may be fully CSS1 compliant, but that’s where the support stops — well short of Netscape 6 and Mozilla, Opera and even IE5 for the Mac.
Still, at least IE6 now properly implements the box model, so there should be fewer cross-browser problems with that.
More bad news, though: IE6 is not fully compliant with the HTML standards, completely ignoring the abbr element (recognised by Netscape 6, Mozilla, Opera, and, er, IE5 for the Mac). I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Microsoft (at least, those in Microsoft who develop the Windows browser) can’t see the difference between abbr and acronym.
One very unpleasant surprise for web authors is a change in the way IE6 handles the alignment of text within table cells. At first I had the impression that it had shifted the default from "left" to "center". In fact, it’s more complicated than that. In IE6, the alignment is inherited, so nest a text-containing table without any specified alignment within a centre-aligned cell or <div> and the text is centred.
There’s been some discussion over whether this is actually an example of it being strictly compliant with the W3C recommendations, but whether it is or isn’t it’s a real pain.
One new feature of the browser is a pop-up toolbar associated with images (providing they are not links). I’d heard you would have to click (or possibly right-click) on the image for the toolbar to appear, but I found it popping up as soon as the cursor was over an image.
This toolbar enables the user to save an image, e-mail it to someone, or print it out. It doesn’t allow you to do anything you couldn’t do before, it’s simply a little easier to grab the image. Some people have got quite upset about it, saying that Microsoft is encouraging users to breach copyright. That’s a bit over the top — it isn’t exactly difficult to grab images from the Web without the toolbar. It will make it easier for those too dim to know what the right mouse button is for, I suppose…
What I don’t like about it is that it’s just irritating. IE is irritating enough when it produces a tooltip from the ALT attribute, but this toolbar is even more obtrusive than that.
There’s really very little to say about this browser beyond the fact that it is not much different from the previous version of Internet Explorer for Windows. What differences there are are mostly irritating or no big deal. CSS1 compliance with proper implementation of the box model is good — but it’s hardly impressive when you consider that other browsers, particularly Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh (which wasn’t exactly released yesterday), have much better CSS support — and for that matter HTML support.
I’d be tempted to say this release was something of a lifebelt for Netscape — but I think Netscape needs a lot more than a lifebelt.
If you are a user, you don’t need this browser — downloading it is a very lengthy procedure, and you don’t get benefits which would make that worthwhile. Of course, pretty soon anyone buying a new system will have IE6 bundled with it.
If you’re a web author, there is a good argument for having it to make sure that text in table cells is properly aligned. That is, seriously, the only reason I can come up with for getting this browser now. I don’t think any major upgrade to a piece of software has been so much of a non-event. After seeing this, I feel much more benign towards Netscape 6.
© DC 2001. All rights reserved.
