…that looks weird: It’s your browser that’s making it look weird.

In this article I’m talking to everybody; geek and technophobe alike. In this article I’m going to try to avoid being technical, for the sake of the technophobes. In this article I’m going to be concentrating upon facts rather than explanations. In this article I’m going to help those of you who still use Internet Explorer 6 to get a better browsing experience.

I’m not going to suggest you learn techy things and fiddle with your code and settings all day. I’m not going to present you with any magic pre-written fixes to make IE6 work better. I’m not even going to give you a simple magic-bullet that anybody can use to improve an utterly useless browser such as IE6.

No, no, no: All I’m going to do is suggest something. – Whether you IE6 users do it or not will affect how your computer sees this and most other sites, such as Google, for instance, who have themselves stopped supporting IE6.

(Yes, it is true that I’m an anti-IE6-campaigner; and you’re about to find out why.)

Before I do I’m going to tell you just a little about IE6 in layman’s terms:-

It sucks! Yes, it’s a nightmare. Coders and webmasters hate it, people who use XP and are in the least tech-savvy commonly rarely use it; or upgrade to IE7 or IE8, and other than that it appears lazy people and the non-tech-savvy who use XP just don’t bother at all, and then complain when a website doesn’t resolve properly in their browser.

What they don’t realise is that the website looks crappy because they’re viewing it in IE6.

- So why did Microsoft supply IE6 with XP then?

‘Good question. In his article “Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer” from June 15th 2004 on his Lockergnome blog, Chris Pirillo, himself a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), puts it this way: –

“…  but not in IE. Ask yourself why a company would choose not to support standards that benefit everyone? The way I see it, it’s for precisely one of two reasons – either they [, Microsoft,] are unable to, or they don’t want to. Given the fact that they are a multi-billion dollar company (one of the richest on the planet), I can’t help but lean toward the second option. Without going into too much detail (See Longhorn), they have their own plans, and those plans involve implementing their own standard and forcing it upon the world. Call me a geek/hippie, but the idea of a multi-billion dollar corporation snubbing its nose at agreed-upon standards is nothing short of infuriating.”

IE7 was another non-standards-compliant browser to some extent; but only partially so: A kind of IE6-with-the-major-bugs-fixed, and it shipped with the calamity that Microsoft called Vista. – At least IE7 was a step in the right direction if nothing else.

In IE8, however, Microsoft have worked long and hard in recoding the entire thing from scratch, and ditching most of the problem code that caused the issues in the first place. Whilst IE8 is nothing special, it is almost like you would expect a normal browser to be in 2009. – And it works in XP, Vista, and ships with Windows 7.

- So if you’re determined to use Internet Explorer, do yourself a favour and upgrade to IE8… Unless you’re using Windows 2000 as an operating system; in which case you’re stuck with IE6; but you can always download FireFox, Opera, or Safari. – And/or a number of others if you prefer.

- And that, everybody, is how you improve your browsing experience: Upgrade Internet Explorer to IE8, and/or download another browser and use it.

I use FireFox mainly. I also have Safari installed; which I find useful for watching online video in due to its larger screen area. I have upgraded to IE8 on my XP machine, but I hardly ever use it. I think I have an obscure browser called K-Meleon installed too; which, in all honesty isn’t that bad a browser: It’s open-source; so you might like to give it a spin, contribute towards development, or even, if you’re a coder geek, help develop it.

On that note I will close this unscheduled notelet that I allowed to fall into my blog for your enlightenment this weekend.

Enjoy your Sunday.