Product Reviews

Judgement day: Communicator v4.0 vs Internet Explorer v4.0

Now that Microsoft is Apple's friend again, you've got to admire its methods. And the way Bill Gates has completely reversed the direction of the company, from dismissing the Internet as an irrelevance to making it core to the business's philosophy, is a move that deserves respect. The fruits of this philosophy are now on their way in the form of some impressive Internet products.

Essential to success on the Internet is controlling the Web, and Microsoft's flagship, Internet Explorer 4.0, is vital in the battle for the hearts and minds of Internet users. But ranged against Microsoft is Netscape Communicator, a suite of Internet programs revolving around the industry-leading Navigator browser, but also including mail, news, intranet, and even IBM mainframe access software. Netscape's technological lead has been narrowing for some time, and the latest incarnations of Communicator and Internet Explorer could be about reverse the fortunes of these two aggressively driven companies. It's becoming increasingly likely that the future of the Internet will be Microsoft-grey.

Footprints

There used to be only one browser choice for owners of 68K Macs as Internet Explorer came in a 68040 version and Communicator didn't. This has now changed, with both browsers coming in 68K versions. As such, the decision is now down to memory: Internet Explorer requires only 8Mb RAM, while Communicator demands 16Mb. However, both browsers are hard-disk hungry. Even if you strip them down to their bare essentials (a bargain 18Mb with Navigator), you're still looking at losing 20Mb to 40Mb of disk space, not including cache, when you install either browsers.

The cause of this greatly exaggerated disk usage is the number of features they incorporate; the list of things these browsers can do is astounding. Despite this, you can't help but yearn for the days when Navigator fitted on a single high-density floppy. Other browser manufacturers are beginning to tout lightweight Web clients to take advantage of this market gap, but because non-mainstream browsers often exclude advanced features such as JavaScript or Frames, they render the more interesting parts of the Web unvisitable. This, too, could be about to change with the advent of programs like Opera (soon to be available on the Mac) which manage to include these features in only a couple of megabytes. Both Microsoft and Netscape will have to take note of such entrants.

Explorer 4.0 was still in beta testing at the time of going to press, but the finished version should be appearing at about the time you read this.

User interface

The user interface has changed surprisingly little from the version 3 browsers. The central control panel is still the toolbar at the top of the page, although both have been touched up to look less heavy and metallic than their predecessors. Communicator's Bookmarks have been placed on a separate toolbar window for quick access, although they can still be accessed from the menu bar. Another handy addition to Communicator's Bookmark handling is the ability to file bookmarks directly into folders - a feature pinched from Internet Explorer.

The toolbars of both Internet Explorer and Communicator are far more configurable than before, and you can drag them to your personal optimal choice. As befits a program that bills itself as a suite of tools, Communicator also now comes with a button pad that lets you flip between news, intranet, mail, Composer and Navigator, which can either float or sit on your toolbar. As a floater, it's about the most irritating user interface upgrade I've seen for a long time, and so tends to remain switched off on my machine. However, some people use Communicator for almost every activity, so its inclusion can be justified.

More useful is the ability of both browsers to autocomplete URLs. If you've visited a site before, both programs should recognise the URL you're typing from the first few characters and attempt to finish it off for you. Communicator's autocomplete is very fast and useful (particularly for those half-remembered URLs), albeit with a buggy drawback: it recalls the URLs of frames within a page more readily than the actually URL you typed to get there, so you still have to edit the URL before hitting return in most cases. Internet Explorer's autocompletion can be extremely sluggish, so you often manage to type the URL in faster than the browser can recall it.

The back and forward buttons in both applications, now include drop-down menus of sites visited so a click and hold lets you traverse your history from the toolbar. Both toolbars are more customisable than before, with the enhanced ability to place common links as icons in the toolbar (this is new to Communicator but has been incorporated in Internet Explorer for some time).

Speed

The extra complexity of the new browsers should, in theory, slow the programs down substantially as they try to parse pages through an ever-more involved set of rules. This is certainly the case with Netscape Communicator. I often switch back to Navigator 3.0 out of frustration with Communicator's speed. Ironically, its blind spots are all Netscape innovations - Frames, JavaScript, Java and plug-ins.

The Java problem is probably the most irritating of all these speed glitches. When Communicator loads a page containing a plug-in, it loads up an internal module written in Java. This halts everything on your computer as the Java Virtual Machine initialises itself, and there's a further delay while the plug-in itself loads and displays its content. The Java lag in Communicator doesn't bode well for the pure Java version scheduled for the second quarter of next year. Netscape wants to make Communicator completely platform-independent by releasing a version written entirely in Java with native versions for the mainstream platforms released as well, but, given the speed of its Java Virtual Machine, this hardly seems like a step in the right direction.

Internet Explorer, by contrast, is speedier than previous versions. Microsoft's Mac software division has gone against years of tradition and produced a more efficient upgrade, and should be applauded for doing so. Internet Explorer even loads quicker, although Communicator is so sluggish it makes this a relatively easy task for all but the most muscle-bound software. The Internet Explorer Java Virtual Machine is faster than Communicator's, too, although this is less of a surprise as it was faster in the previous version. Java and Macs have never been the most comfortable of bedfellows, but Microsoft's implementation of this browser actually makes heavy Java pages easy to use. Microsoft claims Internet Explorer 4.0 will be even faster in its final release version.

The price for this functionality is Microsoft's interpretation of what counts as pure Java. Sun is already suing Microsoft for allegedly failing to comply with the terms of its licence, and the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine is actually slightly incompatible with all others (although the difference is less marked on the Mac than PC). However, Communicator also fails to comply with Java version 1.1, which has left a red-faced Netscape scrabbling to bring its product into line while Microsoft evangelises its own interpretation of Java (complete with Windows-specific additions) as the way forward.

Enhancements to HTML

Both Internet Explorer 4 and Communicator extend HTML to allow for greater design control and advanced features such as animation. Surprisingly, both cover much the same feature set, albeit in incompatible ways. Instead of arbitrary placement of HTML elements, both browsers allow designers to position elements, with pixel-perfect precision by displaying them in the equivalent of QuarkXPress frames. Netscape's technology is called layers, while Microsoft has expanded its 'marquee' tag to take on this new responsibility. Objects in layers or marquees can be moved around a page by animating them with a scripting language (usually JavaScript). Both technologies allow objects to be placed in the z-axis - that is, depth, as well as to height and width.

ADVERTISEMENT

This means objects can overlap and the z-ordering can be changed dynamically to allow objects to appear from behind others. This allows any element of a page to be written dynamically, without having to reload the whole page.

Objects can also respond to a wider range of events. Previously, if you wanted to have the page react to the user placing the mouse over an element, you had to somehow make that element a hotlink by encasing it in an A tag, as only links could use the onMouseOver event. Now any element can take the same instruction, allowing complex interactive pages to be created out of standard HTML elements.

Both the versions of HTML in these browsers aspire to being included in the forthcoming HTML 4.0 standard, but Netscape's layers model has already been rejected, while Microsoft's DHTML (dynamic HTML) is more widely accepted by the standards bodies. However, the next version of Communicator will probably be compatible with Internet Explorer 4, which will be the first time Netscape has had to play catch-up with Microsoft.

Security

Considering both products are quite rich in security features (you can encrypt almost anything from within either browser, and both make extensive use of all sorts of digital signatures and certificates), it's unfortunate that both browsers have suffered extensively from security holes which have been widely publicised on the Internet. Communicator is supposed to be free of the bugs that forced the four patch versions, while Microsoft has just released a patched version of Internet Explorer that doesn't reveal passwords and user IDs if poked in the right way.

Getting security right is important to help build confidence in the Web, especially as much sensitive information is published in HTML on intranets and behind firewalls, so hopefully future versions of Communicator and Internet Explorer will be more rigorously tested before release, although the frantic pace of development in the browser war makes this a rather vainglorious hope.

Channels

Both Internet Explorer and Communicator come with a 'push' module -ŹNetscape Netcaster and Microsoft Channels (although this early release of Internet Explorer on the Mac has its channels disabled). Both allow users to download chunks of information as self-contained sites that they can then browse at their own pace, or even offline, without having to reopen a network connection. The theory is that channels enable users to cope with the otherwise bewildering variety of information on the Web and (perhaps more importantly) allow Internet content creators to broadcast their information to a narrow market, which should make them more attractive to advertisers. Studies have shown that as much as a third of Internet users eventually give up on the Web as too difficult to navigate, which is very good news for channels.

Unfortunately, it isn't quite as clear-cut as it appears. Many Web developers hate channels, referring to them as 'glorified bookmarks', and deploring the loss of control over the user's browsing experience. Even Bill Gates is reputed to have given channels a maximum lifespan of nine months. Not surprisingly, the developers with the most sophisticated methods of creating custom content for users through CGIs dislike them most, as channels effectively lock out server-side interaction (although a channel can be generated automatically.)

Ironically, channels are also unattractive to advertisers - the very people they should appeal to. If someone downloads a news site once a day there's no way to measure which pages he or she then actually browses, or whether the channel gets looked at. As Internet advertising is largely sold on accountability, this is a disaster. Online advertising is commonly worked out according to its cost per thousand people viewing an ad. According to this formula, it now costs nearly twice as much to advertise on the online edition of popular quiz game You Don't Know Jack than it does on the number one-rated US TV show Seinfeld. So it's a disaster that channels effectively rob advertisers of the ability to precisely identify their audience.

Both Microsoft and Netscape have signed up major players to provide content for the fledgling technology (in the UK this meant that neither was prepared to launch without getting the BBC on board), but what's currently on offer to the user is shallow and tends to focus on glossy presentation rather than content.

It doesn't help that, once again, the Internet Explorer and Communicator formats for channels are incompatible. From a Web developer's point of view, this means content has to be repurposed yet again to make it visible. To take advantage of all the features available across all popular browsers, sites have to be reworked five times from their sub-HTML 3.2 origins. Few are willing to make the effort, and this hampers acceptance of the new extensions.

To the user, the two competing channel formats are pretty much identical in operation. You select a channel from a listing supplied by the browser manufacturer, set up a download schedule, and sit back and wait for the channel to be automatically pushed into your system. The pages you receive are indistinguishable from HTML, but take advantage of the specific features of each manufacturer's version of the code.

The two formats differ slightly: Netscape has integrated Marimba's Castanet push technology into Netcaster. Netcaster is also marginally more standards-compliant than Internet Explorer, which relies on an ugly hack called a CDF (channel definition format) file to display channels, although the actual content pages are mostly standard HTML. Both formats indicate when new content has come in, and both browsers can auto-dial to collect your subscriptions, a process that requires a good deal of trust on the part of the user.

In the end, Internet Explorer's channels win out. Microsoft has managed to persuade/cajole more high-profile content suppliers into creating Internet Explorer channels and, frankly, on a Mac, if you can get Netcaster to avoid falling over for more than a few minutes you deserve some sort of prize.

It's Communicator's stability on the Mac that lets it down most of all. If it didn't crash quite so often it would be easier to live with its other shortcomings. Stability has been reported as a problem with Communicator by Mac users from across the spectrum of set-ups, from home users to high-end graphics professionals, so the program's instability is clearly independent of platform-specific issues. It's just flaky.

What you're missing

For many users, the real frustration with Internet Explorer 4.0 is that about 50% of the product's functionality has been left behind in the port from Windows to the Mac OS. On the PC, Internet Explorer 4.0 is more of an operating system upgrade than a simple browser. It lets you single-click to start an application or open a document and allows you to view the contents of directories as Web pages, complete with background images and VBScript functions. Most useful is the preview function, which lets you have a glance at the contents of a document by hovering your mouse over it. It's unlikely Microsoft will be bringing these extensions to the Mac, but they do form a central part of Windows 98, so they will become more common ways of working.

Communicator is admirably much the same on a Mac as it is on a PC. Indeed, Netscape's commitment to cross-platform compatibility of its products is still much greater than Microsoft's. Things like the mail client have been over fully to Mac, while Microsoft's Outlook Express and FrontPage Express languish on the PC, unable to port over because they are too intrinsically tied to Windows. Netscape, by contrast, includes Composer as part of the suite, which allows users to create their own HTML. However, Composer is one of the least useful HTML editors and is rarely used, so you can quite happily lop this component off your installation list.

And the winner is...

Praising Microsoft to the skies is a funny position to be in, but Internet Explorer 4.0 is a fine product: stable, fast and advanced. Communicator has much to recommend it, but lacks stability.

There's also a certain inevitability about Internet Explorer's ascension: it's already the leading browser according to some surveys (although other surveys have given it half the market share of Netscape), but this is irrelevant as it will be installed on every new PC come the release of Windows 98. This will persuade content creators to put most of their activity into Explorer-friendly sites, which will persuade more people to use it. Whether this turns out to be playing into Microsoft's hands, or a positive development for the Internet as a whole, remains to be seen.