IE 5 Views the Future

A friend of mine wanted me to back up her old PC and laptop so that she could discard them. She still had a few files that she wanted but hadn't used the computers in more than a couple of years. The PC was an IBM but I forget the model. It had Windows 95 on it! It wouldn't take a USB key as expected by luckily it had a LAN port. So I zipped the needed files and put them on my server. At that point I noticed that it had IE 5 on it. I had an idea and thought to test how IE 5 would see these futuristic websites. Here are a few screenshots with the "About IE" as the very first.



The very first page was from Microsoft® which was offering me to update to their latest browser! As if I will be able to. Don't they do any kind of browser sniffing?

The second page I pointed it to was Firefox download page. It was able to render the page quite nicely, except the main part: the download area with the Firefox icon. Compare it with the correct rendering.





Then comes Google Maps. Tried to search for Canada and look what it gave me. Although IE5 got the XMLhttpRequest object in ActiveX in 2002, this version of IE is probably older and has lots of trouble handling AJAX.

Then I tried Digg and that was one of the worst results. It wasn't able to render almost anything as expected. Although it seems that IE5 had a built-in AdblockPlus feature ;)

Next came another community site: boingboing.net IE5 was able to handle it in a better way than Digg!



In the end are a couple of screenshots of slashdot.org. Although the complex CSS was rendered nicely but barfed when it saw the grey part. The grey part extended for about 9 page-downs after every story!





More to come: screenshots of the mess IE5 created for rendering Apple's page.

Browser Stats

Glazou started this. Here are the browser statistics for 2007 (till today) on my dynamic DNS host:

1. Gecko ----- 56.2%
2. MSIE ------ 31.4%
3. KHTML --- 8.1% (Safari 7.1%)
4. Opera ----- 2.6%

This just reflects the distribution of visitors on the dynamic host and should not be considered for browser popularity calculations. Higher percentage of Gecko is due to most of the stuff being about Mozilla and GNU/Linux. Safari's ratio is probably due to the a few desktop background images I put up for free download. But I noticed that IE 7 already has an update with version number 7.0.5730.11. Seems that the IE team is really working on it now ;)