How To Create Fade Transitions

how I can make simple fade transitions between a series of images using Javascript. I found a tutorial online that does this. However, it doesn't look right because instead of a straight fade from one image to the next, it fades out to white, and quickly fades the new image in from white. That would look ok in some instances, but for my site it would look quite annoying! I also understand that there is an easy way to do what I want in IE, but it is necessary that this works in ALL major browsers. I also do not want to use CSS3 because few browsers actually support that yet.