This article applies to PRTG Network Monitor 8

Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and PRTG 8—The Short Story

When we developed the AJAX user interface of PRTG 8 we had to make a decision: Shall we support IE7 or shall we create twice as much features for all modern browsers instead?

Developing AJAX functions with support for IE6/7 takes about twice the time it takes to create the same functions for modern browsers. We decided to drop IE6/IE7 support in favor of creating much more functionality for modern browsers like Firefox 3.5/3.6, Chrome 4/5 and Safari 4. The result is that PRTG 8 supports IE6/IE7 only with the HTML-based, read-only, limited-functionality “HTML interface”.

Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and PRTG 8—The Long Story

You can use PRTG 8 if you are using IE7 (or even older versions of IE), but you are limited to the HTML-based, read-only, limited-functionality “HTML interface” of PRTG 8.

The full-featured AJAX-Interface does not work on IE5/6/7, many web pages are not even shown correctly on the older IE browsers.

The reasons are that

• IE6 was simply unable to perform various AJAX functions we have implemented in PRTG
• Even IE7 still has a horrible javascript, CSS and AJAX implementation; it was not possible for us to always write a second version of all AJAX functionality just for IE7.
• Another reason is the crawling slow Javascript engine of Internet Explorer 7: On IE7 some browser based features of PRTG take so long to complete that they render the user interface effectively useless. IE7 can be 100 times slower than FF/Chrome for some functions.

When we created the first concept draft of PRTG in 2006 we decided that we wanted to create an amazing browser-based user interface. At that time only few applications were already on that level (Googlemail, one of the first massive-ajax applications, was officially launched in February 2007). We anticipated the rising trend for applications to go into the web-based direction and wanted to use this concept in PRTG.

We at Paessler firmly believe in modern technologies for web browsing. Internet Explorer 7 was released on October 18, 2006, that was 4 years ago, and has not been updated since (except for the ie8 update). Nowadays IE7’s market share is around 10%. Quote from Wikipedia: Although Internet Explorer 7 is more compliant than previous versions, according to all figures it remains the least standards-compliant compared to other major browsers of the period.

Modern browsers (Firefox 3.5/3.6, Chrome 4/5, Safari 4) provide such a superior user experience. Older IE versions are like huge rocks that block the road to better Ajax implementations. Googlemail had dropped support for IE6 in 2007, I think we will see their next step (drop of IE7) in less than 2 years.

What about Internet Explorer 8?

Although we officially support Internet Explorer 8, we do not do this with a full heart. There are some AJAX functions in PRTG that do not work well on Internet Explorer 8 (e.g. the Map Editor). We simply do not recommend to use IE8 for PRTG. It is by far still the slowest and most problematic contestant of current browsers.

The Bottom Line

If you have to use Internet Explorer with PRTG, please use version 8.

If you have any chance to switch to Firefox or Chrome: Please do so now!