How to cope with the surfing flaw in Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer (IE) might display the wrong content when you click on links: after you click on a link to content within a different page on the same or another website, that page might stall at the top of your browser's widow, or stall partway to the content, and not reach the content you clicked for. You, the surfer, are not aware of your browser's malfunction except for the confusion and frustration you feel when you see content that's unrelated to the link you clicked on. To reach the content you want, you then have to scroll down a few lines or several screens, but you don't know that scrolling is required or about how far you must scroll and there's no way to really know when you get there. All IE versions (at least through 6), from the first version in the mid-1990s, have that named-anchor defect.

Quick fix: Go "Back" to the link, deselect the link, then click on the link again. You may have to repeat the process many times.

Full fix: Switch to the free Firefox like savvy web users by the millions are doing.

When you click on a link, your web browser is supposed to take you to the exact correct spot every time -- as all browsers did before IE was introduced in the mid-1990s. Among all the web browsers today, IE seems to be the only one that can't reliably perform this bare-basic surfing task. Microsoft created the defect over a decade ago and stuck with it.

That long-standing IE flaw, besides disserving web users worldwide, disserves websites worldwide by making them appear defective.

"Hypertext" -- the link you click on -- is the magic of the web. It was perfected in the world's first internet browsers before IE came along. But when executing hypertext, IE browsers have difficulty telling the difference between the "top of a page" and the link's "named anchor" down in the page.

Here's what happens. You click once on a link and reach strange content -- because, unknown to you, the browser took you to the top of the page containing the content or to somewhere between the top and the correct content -- therefore you think the website is at fault. It isn't. It's the IE named-anchor flaw making the website look defective, a website that works just fine with any other brand-and-version of browser.

"Website developers have reported long-standing problems with IE reliably locating named anchors on a page." We learned that during a Google search a while back. The longer the page, the deeper the link's named-anchor into the page, the slower your connection, the slower the internet, the worse it gets.

After you click on a link, if the linked-to page hangs up at the top or hangs up partway to the linked content, read this in your browser's address bar: . . . /filename.htm#anchorname. The anchorname is the named anchor of the linked content down in the page. Click on "View/Source" and scroll down the lines of HTML code to the named-anchor code: <a name="anchorname"> . . . </a>. When you witness how the anchorname in the address bar matches the anchorname in the named-anchor code -- and how the text . . . between <a name="anchorname"> and </a> does not appear at the very top of your browser's window -- that's 100% proof positive that your browser's software is defective in bare-basic surfing ability.

This is a serious matter for some webmasters. To make those linking failures less likely to happen -- that is, to minimize chances of defective browser software making their websites look defective -- webmasters who publish substantial content richly woven with inter-page links are forced to chop up their web-sites into tiny web-bites, into hundreds of little pages with shallow links. To play it really safe, a webmaster has to link to the top of a page because you can no longer reliably link to content within another page like you could before IE was introduced and took over.

All other browser-software developers got "hypertext" right the very first time. Years after hypertext handling was perfected in the world's first internet browsers, Microsoft introduced a major hypertext-handling defect in their first IE version and kept it.

The "visited-link" function -- a link changes to a different color after you visit it, a basic function also perfected before IE appeared -- doesn't work correctly in IE either. That's why we coded our pages to disable it, like many other webmasters do.

We await the day when Microsoft fixes their browser, or when superior products like Firefox and others replace it, so we can remove this webpage.