Internet Explorer has faults. That's generally accepted even by people inside Microsoft. There's the broken security model, lack of a pop-up stopper (coming in XP service pack 2), broken CSS, broken PNG implementation and the ability for spyware to plug into unpatched machines. None of those worried me much, I've never had spyware get onto my box, I patch when new patches arrive, I don't use transparent PNG and the broken CSS box model is workable with if you are aware of the problems.

What really annoys me right now is the lack of ability to cope with widescreens, or rather increased DPI. Work bought me a Dell Latitude with a large wide screen. It's a heavy beast, but the wide 1900x1200 screen is wonderful. I get a great large working space for Visual Studio and Outlook's preview pane fits nicely to the right hand side without taking too much space from the folders and message lists. Dell ship them configured with a 120dpi desktop. DPI is a typesetting term meaning "dots per inch". For computers it's basically how many pixels fit in an inch of your screen. The normal PC resolution is 96dpi, and you can change the Dell to use this, but the screen becomes unreadable as the fonts get very small.

The problem comes when IE draws images

IE6 sample Mozilla sample
Internet ExplorerMozilla

The image on the left was screen captured from IE6, the image on the right from Mozilla FireFox (or whatever it's called today). As you can see they are different sizes. IE does not take DPI into consideration when drawing images and so if you are using any DPI setting other than 96 images will stretch and distort. Mozilla gets it right. Of course if you're viewing this on a widescreen Windows machine with a DPI > 96 those images are going to look even worse.

This is not just a widescreen issue, it's an accessibility issue. You cannot rely on a DPI setting, or indeed a specific font size. People with visual difficulties will often increase font sizes, lower screen resolutions, increase DPI and tweak their screens in various ways. IE should be taking account of this.

Accessibility is becoming a bigger issue for web sites, the W3C has had the WAI initiative since 1999 and the UK is starting to take notice as the laws changed to take more notice. IE isn't helping.

[05 May] It's down to IE dynamically scaling on high resolution displays. A registry tweak will stop this behaviour.