Why Internet Explorer is faulty

Quick fix: Download Internet Explorer 7

If you have reached this page, you most likely followed an message from a web page warning you about your web browser. If you are using Internet Explorer 6 or lower (find out here) then your browser is more than a year out of date. (Some might argue it was out of date more than five years ago!)

Why does this matter? The World Wide Web is based on open standards, however, Internet Explorer (IE) does not support several of these standards, or the implementation of the standards is buggy. This means that web developers often need to spend a lot of time changing their code to make their pages work in IE or 'hack' special solutions together to bypass bugs. This is not the way to move the Web forward. One of the technologies behind the Web, CSS level 2, has been around since 2002 (full recommendation since 2004) but IE still falls far short.

The yellow box you just followed the link from highlights just a fraction of these problems:

The image has gray background; it should be transparent. This is because IE6 does not support PNG transparency.
The spacing to the left of the image is larger. This is a bug in IE6: in certain situations spacing is applied double (technical info).
The box may not be the full width of the page (depending on which page you came from). Another bug.

You can read more about open standards at the Web Standards Project FAQ.

Another reason to upgrade IE is security. IE6 has many security holes: Secunia, a leading software security company, lists 21 unpatched security flaws in IE6 (from a whopping total of 121 discovered), while IE7 has seven. (Incidentally, Firefox has five and Opera has none.) It also surfaced recently that a single line of code can crash IE6.

How to fix

That's more than enough reasons to upgrade. The simplest method for Windows XP users is to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. While not perfect, IE7 is a big step forward from version six. This can be done by going to Windows Update and installing all high-priority updates. This shouldn't take too long.

A better solution (and the only answer if you're using an old version like Windows 98) is to install something better. There are many different browsers out there, so I've simplified things by listing the two most popular alternatives for Windows. They are both simple to install and can import your bookmarks, etc. from IE.

Firefox

You've probably heard of the name; Firefox is now very prominent, being used by about 12-15% of users worldwide. It is free and simple to use out of the box. It also supports extensions, of which there are hundreds, that you can 'add-on' to the browser to customize it and add new features.

Opera

Another alternative is Opera. Numerous tests have shown it to be the fastest browser around and it has the best security track-record. It also comes with many features built-in and supports many versions of Windows, including 95/98/ME. Simple to use but has a lot to offer power users.

Safari (coming soon)

The Mac browser from Apple, creator of iTunes et al. It is in beta right now, and from my limited usage it's buggy as hell so I don't recommend it. The final product is likely to be pretty slick though.

Web developers

Web developers can encourage their visitors to upgrade from IE6 by using the code below, the same code I use on several of my pages. Or do your own to fit into your own design. If you design your own banner/alert, you should encourage the user to upgrade, not to switch to Firefox, etc. And there is no sense in blocking IE6 users either - at the moment they still count for around 50% of all web traffic.