Internet Explorer Archive

Microsoft Corp., bowing to federal government demands, will make it easier for computer users to substitute rival Web browsers for the company's Internet Explorer, people familiar with the matter said.

Microsoft has issued two security advisories for widespread products: the Internet Explorer browser and Windows XP. The patch posted Wednesday points to a "critical" flaw in several versions of IE, regardless of the version of the Windows operating system it runs under. Microsoft also issued an alert regarding a less severe problem with Windows XP.

Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is the most recent version of the Internet Explorer 6 core technologies in most Windows OSes.Total download size for a typical installation is approximately 25 MB. However, because setup downloads only those files that are necessary for your computer, this size can vary between 11 and 75 MB. In the beset case, users who have already applied the WindowsXP SP1, might only need to download a few KBs.

Netscape browsers have continued to lose market share at a steady clip, falling to a new low of 3.4 percent as of this week, according to new figures. A year ago, Netscape's market share stood at 13 percent, but fell steeply to 7 percent by March, as IE 6 gained popularity. IE has now reached 96 percent market penetration, according to StatMarket, up from 87 percent a year ago. Mozilla gained some market share when it finally reached a 1.0 release earlier this year, but browsers such as Mozilla and Opera still only accounted for less than 1 percent of the market, StatMarket said.

Microsoft yesterday released a new beta build 2800.1067 of Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1 to its set of external testers. The email sent to testers states that this new beta build includes all IE 6 security patches up to and including the security patch released on May 15th which addresses Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-023. The report was found at ActiveWin.

Standards mean little to developers looking for the biggest audience online: Internet Explorer users.
Our Take: OSNews serves more pages to Internet Explorer users than to all the rest, however, being faithful to the multi-platform nature of OSNews, our site is hand-coded and compatible with all mainstream browsers. We include support for WAP and Unix text-mode browsers, AvantGO and other, older (and sometimes... obscure), browsers. More info, in our recent discussion here.

"Microsoft on Moday released an updated version of its Internet Explorer Web browser software for the Macintosh. Version 5.2 of IE for the Mac is available for free from Microsoft's Mactopia Web site. New features include better handling of fonts through OS X 10.1.5's Quartz graphics engine." Read the report at ZDNews. Our Take:The (since forever) text input/form bugs, are still not fixed though...

Late last week in an online article The OmniGroup president, William Shipley (makers of OmniWeb for MacOSX) opined that Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) would eventually stop development of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh.

From ZDNews: "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.0 was the most popular browser on the Web last month, with a total global usage share of 44.7 percent, according to Net analysis company OneStat.com. Microsoft IE 5.5 took the second spot with 26 percent of the global usage share, followed by IE 5.0 with 25 percent, AOL Time Warner's Netscape Navigator 4.x with 1.6 percent, Netscape Navigator 3.x with 0.5 percent and Opera 6.x with 0.4 percent. The numbers show that 'Microsoft dominates the browser market with a total global usage share of 97% on the Web,' said Niels Brinkman, one of the founders of OneStat.com." Let's wait and see if the release of Mozilla next month will at least overthrown Netscape 4.x which currently holds 1.6%. Konqueror and OmniWeb can only deliver better scores if their perspective operating systems they run on gain more popularity (Linux ~1%, MacOS <3%).

"The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has grabbed nearly one-third of the worldwide browser market, according to a new study. IE 6 was released last August, and in its first week on the market grabbed a 2.4 percent share, according to StatMarket, a division of audience measurement service WebSideStory. StatMarket said Wednesday that that figure has risen to 30.4 percent, making it the second most popular browser behind its predecessor, Microsoft's IE 5." What the article fails to mention is that, overall, the IE browsers gather more than 82% of the market. In other Internet news, ExtremeTech has a very interesting article regarding IPv6: "The Promise, The Problems, The Protocol".