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Internet Explorer (or IE) is Microsoft's web browser, which is included within Microsoft Windows. The current version is Internet Explorer 7, but Internet Explorer 6 is still widely in use.

Internet Explorer 6

IE6 — although released in August 2001 — is still widely in use today, with a market share of around 30% (from 1 Feb – 23rd Sept 2008), making it the second most used browser at the time of writing.

The browser was the first version to include full support for CSS1 and other new technologies such as DHTML and .NET. It also contained improved media integration and improved security options such as security zones and cookie management.

However, many people complain about how IE6 doesn't go far enough both in terms of security and standards compliance. IE6 does not follow HTML and CSS specifications, and hence causes significant problems for website designers. IE6 has been hit by many security vulnerabilities, some which still haven't been fixed to date

With influential companies such as Apple, Facebook, and 37signals dropping support for IE6, web designers are starting to question whether to support IE6 anymore. The argument for no longer checking sites in IE6 is that the browser is now eight years old, and getting websites to work properly in IE6 wastes resources better spent elsewhere; with the argument against dropping support being the large percentage of people who still use the browser, because some users on corporate machines are unable to easily upgrade to IE7.

Internet Explorer 7

IE7 is the current version of Internet Explorer — released in October 2006 — and is the most popular browser used today with about 45% of market usage.

This version was a significant rewrite, and is no longer closely integrated with Windows. Other updates include a big change in user interface, with a much simpler design with a search box and tabbed browsing (being the last major browser to support these). Many security and standards compliance problems have been fixed, although many people say that they haven't gone far enough (IE7 isn't Acid2 compliant).

Internet Explorer 8

IE8 is the current development version, currently in public beta testing (with beta 2 currently available). New features include better support for standards (although it will only be Acid2 compliant, with Microsoft choosing not to work towards Acid3). This will partially be achieved by using version targeting: a new meta tag can be included in a web page in order to make the browser render the HTML as the older versions.

Other updates include a privacy mode (which allows the user to browse sites without them being logged in the History), improved tabs, and new tabs being a whole new IE process. This means if a poorly coded website was to crash IE, only that tab would crash rather than the whole browser, since opening a new tab would effectively make another copy of Internet Explorer run at the same time.