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IE 5.5 Display Bug May Give Bad First Impressions
Originally Published May 10, 2001 (Last Updated January 2002)

Amid controversies over slow performance claims, installation issues, and arguments that Microsoft disregarded web standards with their latest extensions to their popular browser (Dynamic HTML (DHTML) behaviors), you can add another issue to the complaint list. Microsoft's IE 5.5 has an annoying display bug that even as of Service Pack 2 has still not been fixed.

The bug, documented in Microsoft Support Article ID: Q277571, has not been widely reported. The software glitch causes a display issue with web pages when they are downloaded for the first time, which could easily give the party viewing the web page a bad first impression of the website.

Upon the initial loading of a web page that utilizes jpeg images that have been tiled horizontally, an additional line will show up between the images, matched to the background color of the web page. Microsoft refers to these lines as 'scan lines'. On most websites affected by this issue the result is the appearance of one or more white spaces in between images. In effect a website that employs this type of image technique is displayed incorrectly!

Screen captures of samples created to demonstrate the bug:

Example showing scan lines issue in IE 5.5 SP1 on Win2000	Example showing normal rendering in IE 5.01 SP2 on Win2000

This issue is especially noticeable on sites employing the use of tables to control page layout, a method utilized by many design firms to produce websites that are backward compatible with previous web browsers.

Microsoft has reported that the problem may occur in Win98, WinNT, or Win2000, though the problem has only surfaced in IE 5.5 on the Win2000 platform in our testing.

So which IE should you use? If you're a skeptic, and don't like to install the first run of a new web browser version because of the possibility of security problems or other serious bugs, then we highly recommend IE 5.01 with SP2 (Service Pack 2), which has proven itself to be highly reliable and relatively bug free.

If you have to have the 'latest and greatest' then skip IE 5.5 and download the new IE 6 web browser. (So far the browser has worked well in our testing, but there are reports of security issues including a cookie vulnerability that you should consider before installing IE 6.)