•  Internet Explorer 8.0.6001 for Vista Last revised 2008-03-22..
•  Internet Explorer 7.0.6000 for XP/W2K3/Vista Last revised 2008-03-22..
•  Internet Explorer 6.0.2800 for NT/W2K Last revised 2008-03-22.

IE comes bundled with Microsoft’s various operating systems. Click on the icon above to download.

To clear the in-RAM ClassLoader Applet cache, click Tools ⇒ Java Console ⇒ x .

Many commercial sites test their web pages only with IE, and make use of IE’s weird extensions, and forgiveness of certain bugs, which cause the website to be viewable only with IE. Even the Canadian government sometimes pulls this cheap stunt. I write rude letters to webmasters who do this, but that’s the way the world is.

IE does printing better than any other browser, but it still can’t break pages properly. Many commercial websites test only with IE, so IE is the best browser to use for on-line shopping.

If you shut IE down in the middle of a download, the transfer is not interrupted. It continues to completion in its own tiny window.

IE comes with either no Java support or an ancient old proprietary MS Java that supports only JDK 1.1.4. It does not include RMI and a few other parts of Java. It does not support Java 1.2+ which means it lacks support for Swing and Collections. The JVM is no longer even available on their site, so it is for all practical purposes dead. Microsoft explained they pulled it to simplify their legal battles with Sun over Java. You must replace the Java that comes with it with the most recent JRE from Sun.

IE zoom is inept. To see what I mean try the Opera zoom then the IE zoom. IE makes you scroll both horizontally and vertically to read the page. It does not reflow the text the way Opera does so that you can read without horizontally scrolling.

Make sure you turn off ActiveX and autodownload or you will pick up trojans or viruses similar to the, thankfully defunct, CometCursor in your website travels.

If you have any control of your customers, get them to install the Java plug-in 1.6.0_06. If not, limit yourself to the ancient Java 1.1 features and exhaustively test the code with an old compiler and runtime to make sure you did not accidentally use a new feature.

PC World rated IE the worst browser and the 8th worse technical product of all time.

IE, however is one of the few browsers to properly support the <COL command both style and alignment. This makes IE the best browsers to view the HTML cheat sheet which makes use of it to apply styles to entire columns.

IE does not have its own individualising skins/themes. However, lets you modify the colours. It takes on the system theme. I like each of my browsers to look distinctly different so I can easily tell which one I am using.

Tips

• If you lose your IE icon, you can recreate the shortcut to "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" Start in %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%.
• If you lose IE entirely, you can download IE 7 or download IE 6.

Testing