I, like many other web designers out there, have been patiently awaiting the arrival of Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft had released a public preview of the browser in the early summer but I had decided to pass on it altogether and await the definitive version. I thought I'd leave the bug reports and frustration of beta preview to those more stout of heart and reap the benefits of their hard work. Come late August the final version was available for download and 10 or so minutes after discovering its availability and going through the straightforward installation process I had it sitting, ready for operation, on my desktop. A couple mouse clicks later I had the browser open and... was I happy? Ahhh... No.

Don't get me wrong... Microsoft has refined and improved their popular browser in many ways. Unfortunately, for all the whizzz-bang improvements there is one glaring and somewhat inexplicable omission. IE 6 for Windows still lacks complete support for the Portable Network Graphic (PNG) file format. "Who cares?" you may be asking yourself. "What's wrong with GIF and JPEG?" you may be saying. Anyone who has spent any time optimizing graphics for a web page will know how limited the current formats are and how revolutionary PNG is. The potential for web design using PNG is an exciting prospect... a potential that, unfortunately, will remain unrealized for a while yet.