Product Reviews

Initially released as a free addition to Windows 95, Microsoft Internet Explorer has always been in the shadow of Netscape Navigator in terms of features, speed, Java support and polish.

This all looks set to change with the long-awaited release of Internet Explorer 3.0 (now available, free, as a public beta test release from Microsoft's Web site).

While Netscape Navigator 3.0 is more feature-laden and consequently bigger and slower than previous incarnations, Microsoft Internet Explorer has been refined and optimised into a Web browser that has almost as many features, but is both smaller and faster than its rival.

One of Internet Explorer's traditional weaknesses on the Mac has been its implementation of frames. Version 2.1 was capable of displaying frames, but not without some glitches, such as corrupted colours appearing on complex frame-based pages and the occasional error when running Open Transport.

These bugs have all been tidied up. Frames in Internet Explorer 3.0 appear faster, scroll cleaner and redraw more quickly than they do in Navigator 3.0.

Internet Explorer 3.0 is the first browser to use HTML 3.2's new floating frames and cascading style sheets. Floating frames let Web authors embed HTML pages within other HTML pages as if they're placing an image, while cascading style sheets enable Web authors to specify global properties that affect style information (such as fonts, colours, margins and indents) for Web pages or whole sites.

HTML style sheets can be set up to define a publication's entire look and feel, and these tags mark the first tentative steps towards making HTML a real publishing language. Web authors can now specify how a document's body text will appear in different colours and sizes, depending on its properties. Pages viewed using browsers that employ style sheets look quite different when, for example, viewed using Internet Explorer 2.1 or Navigator 3.0.

Internet Explorer 3.0 finally supports Java, via the JManager interface. This means the application can now utilise different Java engines, including implementations from Metrowerks and Apple - neither of which is quite ready yet.

Microsoft plans to bundle Metrowerks's Java with Internet Explorer, but if you want to view applets in a browser window you will have to install a beta version of Apple's Mac OS Runtime for Java (which is available separately from Apple's Web site at www.devtools.apple.com/mrj/). Don't worry if the combination sounds cumbersome and slow; our tests showed that Explorer executed all our test Java applets faster and more reliably than Netscape Navigator 3.0. Microsoft has not yet announced whether it will be supplying Explorer 3.0 as a Cyberdog component.

Some of the Windows 95 version's neater interface features - sliding control bars, floating menus, and the like - have been omitted from the Mac release, while other new features, such as greyed-out controls that become active when the pointer is dragged over them, and single-mouse button controls, have led to a few inconsistencies with the Mac interface. But these are pretty unobtrusive and Explorer

The program's toolbar has been completely overhauled to make it customisable and very simple to use. When you drag a hyperlink to the toolbar (from a Web browser or from an email or news program), Explorer adds it as a new button.

In addition to your list of favourite sites, the toolbar contains two other regions: the currently-active URL and control buttons. These areas can be moved about freely, even to the point where they can be stacked on top of each another, allowing them to share space on one row if you have a small screen area.

Internet Explorer 3.0 comes with Internet Mail and News 1.0, separate email and NNTP Usenet news client applications. Although they hardly compete with the full versions of Claris Emailer or Eudora Pro 3.0 and NewsHopper, Internet Mail and News provide neat and integrated facilities.

Internet News is excellent and can use Internet Config's settings (if Internet Config is installed) without the bugs that plagued earlier versions of Internet Explorer. Be warned, though, the two applications don't offer message filtering, so if you need to file away lots of different messages from different mailing lists or if you like to use kill files or selective highlighting of messages, you will have to do it all by hand.

Despite the many new features that come with Internet Explorer 3.0, there are a few flies in the ointment. It's disappointing to see downloads taking place in the browser window, rather than in a floating window like Netscape Navigator (this has the added benefit of leaving the user to continue browsing while the file is being downloaded).

Internet Explorer 3.0 allows you to simultaneously browse while you download, but you need to open up a new browser window in order to do this.

Internet Explorer 3.0 provides internal support for a number of common multimedia file formats. However, even though it plays QuickTime movies, QuickTime VR, various standard audio formats and MIDI without requiring special plug-ins, the program is incapable of playing them in pages designed to be used by Navigator plug-ins (it will, however, prefer those plug-ins if they're installed). Internet Explorer 3.0 ought to recognise an embedded file it can handle, and play it, if a special plug-in isn't installed.

The browser's lack of an offline News facility is another big disappointment. Telephone charges in the UK are expensive enough, so unless you only take an occasional or cursory glance through low-volume Usenet newsgroups, you will probably want something a little more powerful such as NewsHopper.

JavaScript (or rather JScript, Microsoft's own implementation of Netscape's runtime language) and Content Advisor tags enabling Internet Explorer 3.0 to recognise PICS ratings are planned for the next beta release, which will hopefully be available by the time you read this. Both of these features have been included in Netscape Navigator for some time.

These few issues aside, the beta release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 is an excellent taste of things to come.

The company's Internet strategy, while proprietary in many places, appears considerably less woolly and reactive than Netscape's.

Running Java-equipped pages on higher-end machines and Power Macs shows Netscape Navigator to be marginally slower than Explorer 3.0 which, for many users, may tip the balance of power.

With Internet Explorer 3.0's small size, compact memory footprint (even on Power Macs it's only just over 5Mb) and speed, it should now be possible to have a high-performance Web browser installed on low-end PowerBooks and older machines (such as Mac LCs and 68030-based Macs).