We all hate Internet Explorer 6.0 as a web browser because it is slow and clunky and unfriendly. Unfortunately, most of the world uses Internet Explorer because it is bundled for free with Windows and so we, as content providers, must deal with that horrible fact of how we are experienced throughout the world.
Over 77 percent of the people who read this blog use Internet Explorer.
I currently use Firefox 1.5 and it is a fine browser with lots of ways to enhance its bare-bones features.
I recently upgraded to a ThinkPad T43p and for the past week or so I’ve been living a schizophrenic experience with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 1.5.
Images in Firefox look beautiful and in Internet Explorer they look chalky and dithered and incredibly ugly!
My laptop color depth is set to 32-bit High Color and my gamma correction is just fine.
I never use Internet Explorer for anything, so when I fired up my old Toshiba Qosmio
and saw the same schizophrenic quality of images where Firefox was
rendering everything beautifully and Internet Explorer was rendering
the images like something from Mosaic on SpryNet in 1987 — I knew
something unwelcome was up.
I did some web sleuthing and discovered Internet Explorer, by default,
plays around with your web images and the end result is not pretty!
If
you are using Internet Explorer and the images you view do not look
good to your eye, or if they appear more awful compared to the same
page viewed in Firefox, here’s the fix:
Choose TOOLS from your menu bar.
Pick INTERNET OPTIONS.
Click on the ADVANCED tab.
Scroll down and find the section that deals with MULTIMEDIA.
UNcheck the default ENABLE AUTOMATIC IMAGE RESIZING.
Click OK and reload a page with images.
You should get immediate image improvement 95 percent of the time over
what you were seeing before. You can use my pre-existing House of Wax Review
to compare the difference between the settings. With the default
Internet Explorer setting enabled the large images in the review look
terrible.
Turn off the default setting and the images immediately
improve. That review has high quality images that need no resizing by
Internet Explorer. The images in that review look just dandy in a
default Firefox 1.5 installation without any messing around with Images
settings.
If the images in that review still look chalky to you in Internet
Explorer 6.0 after this setting correction then you are likely in the 5
percent who have a gamma problem with your monitor and video card and a
program like Adobe PhotoShop can help you resolve that issue on your
machine.
Are there any other fixes we should all be making in our default
Internet Explorer 6.0 setup? If so, what are they and how do we
implement them? If you would like to just contribute confirmation of
your shared hatred of Internet Explorer, we welcome that, too.