Why does IE6 for Server 2003 not work the same as IE6 for XP?

Question

I am developing a simple webpage in Windows Server 2003. I am testing the webpage with multiple IEs: IE4,5,6,7,8.

I have a problem is that only IE7 and IE8 are displaying my webpages correctly. This started occurring since I used the recent version of jQuery.

When I try to test using IE6, AJAX controls do not work properly. The same page works in Windows XP on IE6 on a different machine.

I need to fix the bug I am having in Internet Explorer.

• Does anyone know of a bugfix so that I can test on Windows Server 2003?
• Is there some other method to test IE6 effectively in Windows Server 2003?
• Why would IE6 on Windows Server 2003 behave differently than IE6 on XP?
• How can I make them act the same?

Answer 1

I've found when working with the Multiple IEs that they don't provide a perfect way of testing IE6. I'd recommend downloading Virtual PC 2007 and the IE6 image and seeing if your ajax controls work in that environment. You can download the IE6 virtual hard disk from

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en

Answer 2

The answer to your last two bullet points is that IE6 is a crufty (buggy, insecure) old piece of software that does not implement the relevant W3C and ECMA standards properly. IE7 is a bit better, and IE8 is better still, but the open source alternatives are superior in the area of standards compliance.

While there are a lot of people still using IE6, the proportion is falling steadily. For example, the latest available Net Applications statistics show that IE6 is down to less than 17% and Firefox 3.0 is over 20%.

So what should this mean to you? Well the aim of standards and standards compliance is that a web page that uses the standard in the right way should work, and look pretty much the same, on any standards compliant browser. If you try to support a blatantly non-compliant browser you are going to have to incorporate all sorts of workarounds (alternative versions of pages, clever CSS hacks, conditional Javascript, etc) to get your pages to work across the range of browsers. It is hard work.

So my advice is to not support IE6 and earlier unless you really have to. Instead, spend your time making sure that your web page works on Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. My experience is that pages that work on one of the open source alternatives have a good chance of working on all of them.