Looking at the Web with Internet Explorer 6, one last time

After twelve-and-a-half years, the curtain fell on Windows XP yesterday: the aged operating system transitioned out of extended support and into a long, dark, unsupported and unpatched twilight. Bespoke patches will still be made for those customers willing to pay enough money—mainly governments and large corporations with significant Windows XP installed bases—but for most of the world, XP is now officially a dead operating system.

Windows XP wasn't the only thing to be shuffled into unsupported purgatory yesterday, though. Also included in the group of applications to be dumped down the memory hole is the browser that everyone loves to hate: Internet Explorer 6.

For all its terribleness now, IE6 accomplished a pretty stunning set of achievements. It's the browser that definitively killed Netscape Navigator and ended the first great "Web Browser War." At its height, IE6 was the browser of choice for ninety percent of the Web's users. Its crushing market dominance also ensured that businesses used it internally as well as externally, developing ActiveX-based Web applications for it and further perpetuating Microsoft's ecosystem lock-in.

In fact, it was too dominant—after its release, the Web browser market effectively froze and stagnated for five years. It took the rise of Phoenix (later to be renamed Firebird, and then renamed again to Firefox) from the ashes of Netscape Navigator to spark another round of competition-driven innovation; the four-browser détente we have today between Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox is vastly preferable to those sad days in the mid-2000s when IE6 ruled the Web with its untabbed, exploit-riddled interface.

Most of us have long since moved on, either to one of the mainstream modern browsers or to one of the lesser-used fringe browsers like Opera (though Opera aficionados will probably want to murder me for not pointing out that the Norwegian-developed Opera browser was a viable IE alternative even back in the dark days). However, IE6 is still around—in spite of its dangerous exploitability and lack of patches from here on, it's still going to be used by some small percentage of Web users for a whole host of reasons. According to NetApplications, 4.42 percent of the browsers it has tracked so far this year have been running IE6.

Most mainstream Websites dropped support for IE6 long ago; the weirdly broken Web experienced by IE6 users only vaguely resembles the responsive and dynamic experience the rest of us get with modern browsers. Those holdout IE6 users will experience a broken Web that increasingly diverges from reality—one filled with odd images, partial CSS rendering, and crashes.

This is how the once-mighty IE6 transitions into its own unsupported twilight: in a sad spasm of page rendering errors.