The inventor of the World Wide Wibble, Tim Berners-Lee, claims Internet Exploder is falling behind other browsers in the way it handles an important graphics feature for Web pages.

Berners-Lee, who is also director of the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium, said that most browsers support scalable vector graphics. But Microsoft had been too slow in supporting SVG. A Web image that is encoded as a scalable vector graphic, or SVG, can be resized to fit the computer screen or zoomed into without becoming blocky and losing sharpness.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been favoring the more traditional "bitmaps." IE relies on a plug-in from Adobe to run SVG objects, even on its new beta version of Internet Explorer 8. But in January, Adobe is ending its support of the SVG plug-in and Microsoft will be left high and dry.

A Microsoft spokesman said that the company is looking at SVG support, as there is a demand for vector graphics from Web developers. Microsoft has been caught on the hook a bit because it had supported another format for vector graphics, called Vector Markup Language, or VML. However, the World Wide Web Consortium recommended SVG in 2001.