IE6's reduced support for bookmarklet add-ons

[Jesse Ruderman]

Internet Explorer 5.5, as well as non-IE browsers, support a type of
browser add-on called a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a bit of
javascript embedded in a link address. If you save one of these links
as a favorite (or put it on your links bar) and then activate it while
viewing a page, it will take an action based on the address or
contents of that page. A simple example from bookmarklets.com is "go
up a directory", which chops off the last part of a URL:

javascript:void(location.href=location.href.substring(0,location.href.substring(0,location.href.length-1).lastIndexOf('/')+1))

Other bookmarklets allow the user to sort the rows of an HTML table
(on any page), search a page for links containing a given phrase, or
see certain HTML elements such as named anchors or borderless tables
that would normally be invisible. As you can probably imagine, these
bookmarklets are considerably longer than the one above. This causes
problems in IE 6.0 (Win98), which limits the URL of each favorite to
508 characters, about the size of this paragraph. IE 5.5 allowed
bookmarklets to be up to 2083 characters.

I wrote many bookmarklets while all major browsers supported
bookmarklets above 1800 characters, and many of these bookmarklets
(including "sort table") cannot be expressed in under 508 characters.
These bookmarklets do not work in IE 6.0 even though they worked in IE
5.5.

Is this change likely to be reversed in the next release of Internet
Explorer, or should I advise visitors to use IE 5.5 or Mozilla instead
of IE 6?

Jesse Ruderman
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/