Except for security fixes, Microsoft has steadfastly refused
to make any other updates to IE6 in the past 3 years, although
it has fallen farther behind its two main competitors,
Mozilla and Opera, in features/functionality, standards compliance
and reliability/performance. A recent court decision against
Microsoft by Eolas Technologies and the University of California
at Berkley has changed the situation, though the 500 million
dollar award is being appealed by Microsoft. However, Redmond is
immediately changing some of the offending coding constructs.
Interestingly, Microsoft will limit the changes in IE6 to patches,
security repairs and the new compliance fixes – no fixes to
JavaScript, CSS, DOM, and HTML non-compliance.
Here, we examine
those patent workaround fixes in more detail and what they
mean to Web developers.