Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is a web browser developed by Microsoft for Windows operating systems. Released on August 24, 2001, it is the sixth, and by now discontinued, version of Internet Explorer and the successor to Internet Explorer 5. It does not support earlier versions.
Despite dominating market share (attaining a peak of 90% in mid-2004), this version of Internet Explorer has been widely criticized for its security issues and lack of support for modern web standards, making frequent appearances in "worst tech products of all time" lists, with PC World labeling it "the least secure software on the planet."[2] In 2004, Mozilla finalized Firefox to rival IE6, and it became highly popular and acclaimed for its security, add-ons, speed and other modern features such as tabbed browsing.[3] Microsoft planned to fix these issues in Internet Explorer 7 by June–August 2005,[4][5] but it was delayed until an October 2006 release, over 5 years after IE6 debuted.
Because a substantial percentage of the web audience still used the outdated browser (especially in China), campaigns were established in the late 2000s to encourage users to upgrade to newer versions of Internet Explorer or switch to different browsers. Some websites dropped support for IE6 entirely, most notable of which was Google dropping support in some of its services in March 2010.[6][7] According to Microsoft's modern.ie website, as of August2015[update], 3.1% of users in China and less than 1% in other countries were using IE6.[8]
Internet Explorer 6 was the last version to be called Microsoft Internet Explorer. The software was rebranded as Windows Internet Explorer starting with the release of Internet Explorer 7.
Internet Explorer 6 is no longer supported, and is not available for download from Microsoft.
When IE6 was released, it included a number of enhancements over its predecessor, Internet Explorer 5. It and its browser engineMSHTML (Trident) are required for many programs including Microsoft Encarta. IE6 improved support for Cascading Style Sheets, adding a number of properties that previously had not been implemented and fixing bugs such as the Internet Explorer box model bug.[9] IE6 introduced a redesigned interface based on the operating system's default theme, Luna.
In addition, IE6 added DHTML enhancements, content restricted inline frames, and partial support of DOM level 1 and SMIL 2.0.[10] The MSXML engine was also updated to version 3.0. Other new features included a new version of the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) which introduced IExpress, a utility to create self-extracting INF-based installation packages,[11] Media bar, Windows Messenger integration, fault collection, automatic image resizing, and P3P. Meanwhile, in 2002, the Gopher protocol was disabled.[12]XBM support was dropped.[13]
IE6 was the most widely used web browser during its tenure, surpassing Internet Explorer 5.x. At its peak in 2002 and 2003, IE6 attained a total market share of nearly 90%, with all versions of IE combined reaching 95%. There was little change in IE's market share for several years until Mozilla Firefox was released and gradually began to gain popularity. Microsoft subsequently resumed development of Internet Explorer and released Internet Explorer 7, further reducing the number of IE6 users.
On May 7, 2003 Microsoft online chat, Brian Countryman, Internet Explorer Program Manager, declared that Internet Explorer would cease to be distributed separately from Windows (IE6 would be the last standalone version);[14] it would, however, be continued as a part of the evolution of Windows, with updates coming only bundled in Windows upgrades. Thus, Internet Explorer and Windows itself would be kept more in sync. However, after one release in this fashion. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was the last version of Internet Explorer to have "Microsoft" in the title: later versions changed branding to "Windows Internet Explorer", as a reaction to the findings of anti-competitive tying of Internet Explorer and Windows raised in United States v. Microsoft and the European Union Microsoft competition case.[citation needed]
On March 4, 2011, Microsoft urged web users to stop using IE6 in favor of newer versions of Internet Explorer.[15] They launched a website called IE6 Countdown,[16] which would show how much percentage of the world uses IE6 and aim to get people to upgrade.
Since 2015, all of the older sample questions offered by IE6 Search Companion on other unique functions have been replaced with "Windows 10 Upgrade".[citation needed]
Security problems
The security advisory site Secunia reported 24 unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6 as of February 9, 2010. These vulnerabilities, which include several "moderately critical" ratings, amount to 17% of the total 144 security risks listed on the website as of February 11, 2010.[17]
As of June 23, 2006, Secunia counted 20 unpatched security flaws for Internet Explorer 6, many more and older than for any other browser, even in each individual criticality-level, although some of these flaws only affect Internet Explorer when running on certain versions of Windows or when running in conjunction with certain other applications.[17]
On June 23, 2004, an attacker used two previously undiscovered security holes in Internet Explorer to insert spam-sending software on an unknown number of end-user computers.[18] This malware became known as Download.ject and caused users to infect their computers with a back door and key logger merely by viewing a web page. Infected sites included several financial sites.
Probably the biggest generic security failing of Internet Explorer (and other web browsers too) is the fact that it runs with the same level of access as the logged in user, rather than adopting the principle of least user access. Consequently, any malware executing in the Internet Explorerprocess via a security vulnerability (e.g. Download.ject in the example above) has the same level of access as the user, something that has particular relevance when that user is an Administrator. Tools such as DropMyRights[19] are able to address this issue by restricting the security token of the Internet Explorer process to that of a limited user. However this added level of security is not installed or available by default, and does not offer a simple way to elevate privilegesad hoc when required (for example to access Microsoft Update).
Art Manion, a representative of the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) noted in a vulnerability report that the design of Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 made it difficult to secure. He stated that:
There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, local file system (Local Machine Zone) trust, the Dynamic HTML (DHTML) document object model (in particular, proprietary DHTML features), the HTML Help system, MIME type determination, the graphical user interface (GUI), and ActiveX. … IE is integrated into Windows to such an extent that vulnerabilities in IE frequently provide an attacker significant access to the operating system.[20]
Manion later clarified that most of these concerns were addressed, and other browsers had begun to suffer the same vulnerabilities he identified in the above CERT report.[21]
In response to a belief that Internet Explorer's frequency of exploitation is due in part to its ubiquity, since its market dominance made it the most obvious target, David Wheeler argues that this is not the full story. He notes that Apache HTTP Server had a much larger market share than Microsoft IIS, yet Apache traditionally had fewer security vulnerabilities at the time.[22]
As a result of its issues, some security experts, including Bruce Schneier in 2004, recommended that users stop using Internet Explorer for normal browsing, and switch to a different browser instead.[23] Several notable technology columnists suggested the same idea, including The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg[24] and eWeek's Steven Vaughan-Nichols.[25] On July 6, 2004, US-CERT released an exploit report in which the last of seven workarounds was to use a different browser, especially when visiting untrusted sites.[26]
Internet Explorer 6 was the most widely used web browser during its tenure (surpassing Internet Explorer 5.x), attaining a peak percentage in usage share during 2002 and 2003 in the high 80s[contradictory], and together with other versions up to 95%.[27] It only slowly declined up to 2007, when it lost about half its market share to Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox between late 2006 to 2008.
IE6 remained more popular than its successor in business use for more than a year after IE7 came out.[28] A 2008 DailyTech article noted, "A Survey found 55.2% of companies still use IE 6 as of December 2007", while "IE 7 only has a 23.4 percent adoption rate".[28]
Net Applications estimated IE6 market share at almost 39% for September 2008.[29] According to the same source, IE7 users migrate faster to IE8 than users of its predecessor IE6 did, leading to IE6 once again becoming the most widely used browser during the summer and fall of 2009, eight years after its introduction.[30]
As of February 2010, estimates of IE6's global market share ranged from 10 to 20%.[31][32][33] Nonetheless, IE6 continued to maintain a plurality or even majority presence in the browser market of certain countries, notably China[34] and South Korea.[35][36]
On January 3, 2012, Microsoft announced that usage of IE6 in the United States had dropped below 1%.[40]
In August 2012, IE6 was still the most popular IE web browser in China. It was also the second most used browser overall with a total market share of 22.41%, just behind the Chinese-made 360 Secure Browser at 26.96%.[41]
As of August 2015, IE6 was being used by <1% users in most countries, with the only exception being China (3.1%).[8][43] Usage in China fell below 1% by the end of the year.[44]
Criticism
A common criticism of Internet Explorer is the speed at which fixes are released after the discovery of security problems.
Microsoft attributes the perceived delays to rigorous testing. A posting to the Internet Explorer team blog on August 17, 2004 explained that there are, at minimum, 234 distinct releases of Internet Explorer that Microsoft supports (covering more than two dozen languages, and several different revisions of the operating system and browser level for each language), and that every combination is tested before a patch is released.[45]
In May 2006, PC World rated Internet Explorer 6 the eighth worst tech product of all time.[2] A certain degree of complacency has been alleged against Microsoft over IE6. With near 90% of the browser market, the motive for innovation was not strongly present, resulting in the 5-year time between IE6's introduction and its replacement with IE7. This was a contributing factor for the rapid rise of the free software alternative Mozilla Firefox.
Programming interface
Unlike most other modern browsers, IE6 does not fully nor properly support CSS version 2, which made it difficult for web developers to ensure compatibility with the browser without degrading the experience for users of more advanced browsers. Developers often resorted to strategies such as CSS hacks, conditional comments, or other forms of browser sniffing to make their websites work in IE6.
Additionally, IE6 lacks support for alpha transparency in PNG images, replacing transparent pixels with a solid colour background (grey unless defined in a PNG bKGD chunk). There is a workaround by way of Microsoft's proprietary AlphaImageLoader, but it is more complicated and not wholly comparable in function.[46]
Due to the long-lasting popularity of Internet Explorer 6, web developers had to work around its lack of interfaces. For example, due to the lack of the position: fixed parameter in CSS for elements such as top bars that should remain on screen when the user scrolls, JavaScript code had to be used to determine the user's scrolling position and then push down an element positioned with position: absolute by the same distance to have it remain on screen,[47] or by dividing the page's hypertext into subframes using the <frameset> tag.[48] With media queries unavailable, responsive widths could be implemented to a limited extent by wrapping elements inside tables.[49]
Bugs
Internet Explorer 6 has also been criticized due to its instability. For example, the following code on a website would cause a program crash in IE6:[citation needed]
The user could crash the browser with a single line of code in the address bar, causing a pointer overflow.[50][51]
ms-its:%F0:
Deprecation of support
Nvidia's website displaying a message encouraging Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade to a newer browser.
Several campaigns were later aimed at ridding Internet Explorer 6 from the browser market:
In July 2008, 37signals announced it would phase out support for IE6 beginning in October 2008.[52]
In February 2009, some Norwegian sites began hosting campaigns with the same aim.[53]
In March 2009, a Danish anti-IE6 campaign was launched.[54]
In July 2009, developers of YouTube placed a site notice that warned about the impending deprecation of support for Internet Explorer 6, prompting its users to upgrade their browser. It is claimed that they represented 18% of the site traffic at that time.[55][56]
Also in January 2010, Google announced it would no longer support IE6.[58]
In February 2010, British citizens began to petition their government to stop using IE6,[59] though this was rejected in July 2010.[60]
In March 2010, in agreement with the EU, Microsoft began prompting users of Internet Explorer 6 in the EU with a ballot screen in which they are presented with a list of browsers in random order to select and upgrade to. The website is located at BrowserChoice.eu.[61][62]
In May 2010, Microsoft's Australian division launched a campaign which compared IE6 to 9-year-old milk and urged users to upgrade to IE8.[63][64][65]
With the increasing lack of compatibility with modern web standards, popular websites began removing support for IE6 in 2010, including YouTube[6] and their parent company Google;[7] however large IT company support teams and other employers forcing staff to use IE6 for compatibility reasons slowed upgrades.[66]Microsoft themselves eventually began their own campaign to encourage users to stop using IE6,[67] though stating that they would support IE6 until SP3 (including embedded versions) support is removed.[68] However, on January 12, 2016 when the new Microsoft Lifecycle Support policy for Internet Explorer went into effect, IE6 support on all Windows versions ended, more than 14 years after its original release,[69] making the January 2016 security update for multiple versions of XP Embedded the last that Microsoft publicly issued for IE6.[70]
Internet Explorer uses a zone-based security framework, which means that sites are grouped based upon certain conditions. IE allows the restriction of broad areas of functionality, and also allows specific functions to be restricted. The administration of Internet Explorer is accomplished through the Internet Properties control panel. This utility also administers the Internet Explorer framework as it is implemented by other applications.
Patches and updates to the browser are released periodically and made available through Windows Update web site. Service Pack 2 adds several important security features to Internet Explorer, including a popup blocker and additional security for ActiveX controls. ActiveX support remains in Internet Explorer although access to the "Local Machine Zone" is denied by default since Service Pack 2. However, once an ActiveX control runs and is authorized by the user, it can gain all the privileges of the user, instead of being granted limited privileges as Java or JavaScript do. This was later solved in IE 7, which supported running the browser in a low-permission mode, making malware unable to run unless expressly granted permission by the user.
Internet Explorer 6 dropped Compatibility Mode, which allowed Internet Explorer 4[71] to be run side by side with 5.x.[72][73] Instead, IE6 introduced quirks mode, which causes it to emulate many behaviors of IE 5.5.[74] Rather than being activated by the user, quirks mode is automatically and silently activated when viewing web pages that contain an old, invalid or no DOCTYPE. This feature was later added to all other major browsers to maximize compatibility with old or poorly-coded web pages.[75]
Supported platforms
The Service Pack 1 update supports all of these versions, but Security Version 1[1] is only available as part of SP2 and later service packs for those versions.
Release history
Version
Release date
Significant changes
Shipped with
6.0 Beta 1
March 22, 2001
More CSS changes and bug fixes to be more W3C-compliant.
—
6.0
August 24, 2001
Final release. Removed the smart tag feature, which was introduced in the beta.
Internet Explorer is a retired series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were used in the Windows line of operating systems. While IE has been discontinued on most Windows editions, it remains supported on certain editions of Windows, such as Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC. Starting in 1995, it was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year. Later versions were available as free downloads or in-service packs and included in the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) service releases of Windows 95 and later versions of Windows. Microsoft spent over US$100 million per year on Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people involved in the project by 1999. New feature development for the browser was discontinued in 2016 and ended support on June 15, 2022 for Windows 10 Semi-Annual Channel (SAC), in favor of its successor, Microsoft Edge.
Netscape Navigator is a discontinued proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. Firefox is available for Windows 10 and later versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its unofficial ports are available for various Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and other platforms. It is also available for Android and iOS. However, as with all other iOS web browsers, the iOS version uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko due to platform requirements. An optimized version is also available on the Amazon Fire TV as one of the two main browsers available with Amazon's Silk Browser.
A browser war is a competition for dominance in the usage share of web browsers. The "first browser war" (1995–2001) consisted of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, and the "second browser war" (2004-2017) between Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome.
This is a comparison of both historical and current web browsers based on developer, engine, platform(s), releases, license, and cost.
Trident is a proprietary browser engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer, developed by Microsoft.
Windows Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) is a version of Internet Explorer, a web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on October 18, 2006. It was the first major update to the browser since 2001. It does not support earlier versions of Windows.
Microsoft developed 11 versions of Internet Explorer for Windows from 1995 to 2013. Microsoft also developed Internet Explorer for Mac, Internet Explorer for UNIX, and Internet Explorer Mobile respectively for Apple Macintosh, Unix, and mobile devices; the first two are discontinued but the latter runs on Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) is the fifth, and by now, discontinued, version of the Internet Explorer graphical web browser, the successor to Internet Explorer 4 and one of the main participants of the first browser war. Its distribution methods and Windows integration were involved in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case. Launched on March 18, 1999. Although Internet Explorer 5 ran only on Windows, its siblings Internet Explorer for Mac 5 and Internet Explorer for UNIX 5 supported Mac OS X, Solaris, and HP-UX.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 (IE3) is the third version of the Internet Explorer graphical web browser which was announced in March 1996, and was released on August 13, 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and on January 8, 1997 for Apple Mac OS. It began serious competition against Netscape Navigator in the first Browser war. It was Microsoft's first browser release with a major internal development component. It was the first more widely used version of Internet Explorer, although it did not surpass Netscape or become the browser with the most market share. During its tenure, IE market share went from roughly 3–9% in early 1996 to 20–30% by the end of 1997. In September 1997 it was superseded by Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.
Windows Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is a web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on March 19, 2009.
Internet Explorer 9 or IE9 is the ninth major version of the Internet Explorer web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on March 14, 2011, as the successor to Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 as a major out-of-band version that was not tied to the release schedule of any particular version of Windows, unlike previous versions. It is the first version of Internet Explorer not to be bundled with a Windows operating system, although some OEMs have installed it with Windows on their PCs. Internet Explorer 9 was the last version to be called Windows Internet Explorer. The software was rebranded simply as Internet Explorer starting with the release of Internet Explorer 10.
Mozilla Firefox 2 is a version of Firefox, a web browser released on October 24, 2006 by the Mozilla Corporation.
Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995.
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is a version of the Firefox web browser released in June 2009, adding a variety of new features to Firefox. Version 3.5 was touted as being twice as fast as 3.0. It includes private browsing, has tear-off tabs, and uses the Gecko 1.9.1 engine. It was codenamed Shiretoko during development, and was initially numbered Firefox 3.1 before Mozilla developers decided to change the version to 3.5, to reflect the inclusion of a significantly greater scope of changes than were originally planned. It is the last major version to support X BitMap images.
Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is the eleventh and final version of the Internet Explorer web browser. It was initially released on October 17, 2013, and was later released for older Windows versions on November 7, 2013. It is the successor to Internet Explorer 10, released the previous year, and was the original, default browser before Microsoft Edge was introduced. On April 16, 2019, Internet Explorer 11 was made available to Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8 Standard as the final expansion of Internet Explorer 11 availability. Internet Explorer 11, like its predecessor, is not available for earlier versions of Windows and Windows Server.
Browser security is the application of Internet security to web browsers in order to protect networked data and computer systems from breaches of privacy or malware. Security exploits of browsers often use JavaScript, sometimes with cross-site scripting (XSS) with a secondary payload using Adobe Flash. Security exploits can also take advantage of vulnerabilities that are commonly exploited in all browsers.
Microsoft Edge is a proprietary cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft. Released in 2015 along with both Windows 10 and Xbox One, it was initially built with Microsoft's own proprietary browser engine, EdgeHTML, and their Chakra JavaScript engine. Later on, it was ported to Android and iOS as a fork of Google's Chromium open-source project. In late 2018, Microsoft announced it would completely rebuild Edge as a Chromium-based browser with Blink and V8 engines, which allowed the browser to be ported to macOS. The new Edge was publicly released in January 2020, and on Xbox platforms in 2021. Microsoft has since terminated security support for the original browser. Edge is also available on older Windows versions until early 2023, as well as Linux.
Many South Korean websites have web compatibility issues, due to the non-standard technology that they use. Often this technology works only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), some smartphones, and tablets. Following the revision of the Electronic Signatures Act in January 2021, Microsoft's phased outage policy for IE and the increased use of other web browsers that have solved this compatibility problem in a more standard way.
References
1 2 SV1 stands for "Security Version 1", referring to the set of security enhancements made for that release.[I] This version of Internet Explorer is more popularly known as IE6 SP2, given that it is included with Service Pack 2, but this can lead to confusion, which includes the same functionality in the SP1 update to that operating system. — ^"XPSP2 and its slightly updated user agent string". The Windows Internet Explorer Weblog. Microsoft via MSDN. 2004-09-02. Archived from the original on 2010-01-24. Retrieved 2008-10-05.
↑ Protalinski, Emil (2009-08-11). "Google's Orkut starts phasing out support for IE6". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 2021-10-02. Retrieved 2021-10-02. Last month, Google's YouTube made a similar move [to deprecate IE6]. As you can see below, however, the order of browsers on the video-sharing website is different: Firefox, Chrome, IE8. This order actually changes upon every refresh of the page, which is probably the better solution. It's more important to note that unlike on Orkut, you don't have to log in to get the warning message on YouTube.
↑ Chao, Ingo; Holly Bergevin; Bruno Fassino; John Gallant; Georg Sørtun; Philippe Wittenbergh (June 3, 2006). "Quirks mode in IE 6 and IE 7". satzansatz.de. Archived from the original on May 31, 2017. Retrieved October 5, 2008.
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