If you need to test websites in Internet Explorer 6, this message is for you.
There has just been a patch released by Microsoft that updates IE6 to remove the memory leaks.
Some people seem to think this is great news:
Why is this bad? You might ask…
Well, are you a developer that codes stuff that could ever cause a memory leak in IE6? Do you want to test your code in IE6 to make sure that your careful work to eliminate all the memory leaks has actually worked?
Or do you just want to hide your head in the sand and pretend that all Internet Explorer 6 users that will ever visit your site will have updated their system WITHOUT installing Internet Explorer 7 which is a forced update?.
Think about it… What section of the universe uses IE6 and updates regularly but then manually goes in and disables some of the updates? Developers who need to test! That’s probably about it. Note that this update only affects XP sp2 users. Windows 2000 IE6 users won’t be updating.
Just make sure that you don’t update to the latest IE6 on your testing box or Parallels testing setup or whatever. Because it could render your testing environment pretty stinkin’ useless.
Thomas Aylott / subtleGradient