Internet Explorer 6

[EyesOfARaven]

I am a huge fan of IE6. It is the most lightweight fast browser out there, only finally reached in speed by SRWare Iron (Google Chrome but tweaked for speed and privacy). Anywho, for now obvious reasons, I don't update my browser to IE7 or IE8. Only very recently (past month or so) has IE6 begun to fail me. A few sites don't care about it anymore, and youtube has announced that they won't support it for much longer. Google Chrome Frame is a neat way around these problems, but will only work for supporting sites. I searched around and found that there's a way to force Chrome Frame to render ALL sites, but apparently it's a bit broken. It makes most pages fail to load fully. So basically Chrome Frame is good for it's supported sites and that's about it, which means Google and Youtube for now. Anybody know of any unofficial updates to fix wonky quirks like the IE6 javascript engine or newer revisions of HTML under IE6? Am I going to have to make a patch for it myself (if I can manage)?

Am I alone in liking IE6 so much anyway?

[bizzybody]

You're probably in a smaller minority with IE6 than than Netscape 7 users.

Not even the Win 9x/Me die-hards use IE6 since Opera is still in current development for those versions of Windows. I recently gave away an older PC with WinMe and the latest Opera version. It's new owner is perfectly happy with it for web use.

[Guest]

I guess I have love for it. I only use it for Windows Update though. I cant stand how they put different commands in 4 different places instead of keeping them together.

[Sl@y3D for my n@me]

I'm afraid you are rather alone in loving IE6. Without wanting to knock your choice of browser (it's up to you, entirely), I'd just like to point out some flaws with your points.

With the fact that you're posting in the Windows XP forums while your OS says 98SE, I might as well point out IE6's problems on both platforms.

First of all, while it may appear to load fast ("lightweight"), this is down to the fact that IE is integrated into your OS. It is used for Windows Explorer, and even the desktop in parts. Its components are used by a variety of applications, some of them may ship with Windows, and some of them may not. Effectively, it has already loaded. This isn't an IE criticism, just want to make you aware of the facts.

But that point is relevant to this one. With many benchmarks, IE6 has been proven to be slower out of Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE8, whatever other browser you have. Surprising, isn't it? You would expect that as browsers evolve, they would get slower and slower. Welcome to the new age of browsers, it's all about how fast you can load a page lately.

Going into 98SE territory, IE6 drains resources like... well, a resource vampire, if you will. The more you use IE6 on 98SE, the more unstable it gets, until you have to reboot. Other browsers do not seem to have this problem as much, many 98 users report that they can browse all day and leave their computers on for weeks without rebooting by using a browser that isn't IE6.

Now I'll give the web developers point of view. It's a pain in the a**. I'll explain why. When you make a web page, you make it to conform to a set of standards, like HTML 4.01, XHTML, CSS of whatever version, and so on. Internet Explorer 6 shipped in 2001, the end of the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. While IE6 was a nice improvement over IE5.5, it still implemented (or just didn't implement) parts of the various standards incorrectly. It was still buggy, security holes were and are still all over it. Still, back to the standards point, web developers today effectively have to make two sites, one for most browsers, and one for IE6 (well, more that they make hacks for IE6, which still takes them a lot of time). It is impractical for sites to continue doing this. The web is moving on, IE6 has held it back long enough, uh, please upgrade today!

You can sort of see why people really do not like IE6.

Now, to your question, no, it really isn't possible to patch IE6 to make it more compatible with web standards. The only way I can think of doing this is to replace some files with IE7/8 files. But then, you'd have it asking you for other IE7/8 files, and by the time you'd finished, you would either have messed up Windows, or installed IE7/8.

Well, you're entitled to stay with the browser of your choice, don't get me wrong. It's just that many people would LOVE to see you using something else...