With the arrival of Vista, and then Windows 7, Internet Explorer 6 is finally pretty much dead - and not a moment too soon.
IE6 was the default internet browser that came bundled with Windows XP, and although plenty of people still use XP, not many still use IE6. If you're one of them, repent now, for you shall never enter the kingdom of internet heaven.
So what's the big deal about IE6? Where do I start? How about a little history?
When Microsoft launched Windows XP back in 2001 virtually everyone used a PC or laptop to browse the internet, and almost all of them used Internet Explorer to do it. Now this gave Microsoft the idea that they sort of owned internet browsing, so they could make the rules. They even invented their own tag, called 'marquee' which scrolled things across the page.
So what's the problem? Trying doing a Google search for "IE6 bugs". I just did, and got over 10 millions results.
This browser has been a complete nightmare for web designers from the start. You would diligently follow standards, save your page and... BLAT - Internet Explorer 6 would do something completely stupid with it.
Web designers would spend a large chunk of their time just trying to make IE6 behave like other browsers, ones that followed the standards, like Firefox. Instead of just having an idea for a website and writing the appropriate code, you had to jump through hoops to make IE6 behave itself.
One interesting little IE6 bug was that it didn't handle PNG images properly, and that was a real shame, because they let you do some very pretty things. Let me explain.
There are three types of image files used commonly on the internet.
JPEGs (Joint Photographic Experts Group) are great for photographs because you can render high quality images. But if you compress them too much they get lossy (look crap), and every time you edit and save a JPEG, you will compress it, unless you don't compress them at all, in which case they can be very big. They also don't allow transparency. They're still great, but you have to be careful.
GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) don't take up much disk space, but they are limited to 256 colours. A nice feature of GIFs is that one of the 256 colours can be transparent, so you can leave 'holes' in your images to see the background through.
But PNGs (Portable Network Graphics) have it all. They can be even bigger than JPEGs, so they are not always the best choice, but they never lose quality, and they fully support variable transparency, so some areas of your image can be fully transparent and others just a bit see-through. This lends itself to some very nice effects.
Sadly, it is the transparency feature of PNGs that IE6 didn't support properly, so many web designers didn't use them, rather than upset the world's most popular web browser.
But now all that is in the past, and you can expect PNGs to take their rightful place as a key part of beautiful web design - I can't wait.
