Microsoft Internet Explorer 6

Of late, Microsoft has been playing a strange game with Internet Explorer version numbers. We've seen major revisions only getting a point change and cosmetic touch-ups getting a whole new number. The same continues with IE 6 - whereas IE 5.5 was a major advance over IE 5, version 6 is a more subtle affair.

Of course, it may not appear that way to the users - remember, IE 5.5's valuable enhancements were mostly hidden 'under the hood'. Unlike its predecessor, IE 6's visible differences are its clothing rather than the body underneath, at least when running on Windows XP. New colourful toolbar icons abound, designed to look good with the new XP Luna look and feel.

As this is a new release, there have to be one or two fresh features. The most noticeable is the privacy regime. The cookie privacy features are built around the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Platform for P3P (Privacy Preferences). Of course, P3P is also supported by Netscape 6.1, although IE 6 goes a step further by not just offering customisable blocking of cookies but also by reporting what it's doing. A Privacy Violation icon is displayed in the browser status bar whenever this feature kicks in, and double-clicking on it shows which cookies have been blocked. UK users will notice this straight away as their default IE home page, www.msn.co.uk, throws up a number of privacy warnings. In fact, many popular sites try to send third-party cookies, usually as a result of their banner ad serving systems.

The only other new features of note are a media bar, which links to Microsoft's windowsmedia.com site, and the facility to scale large images so that they fit in the browser window. Note this only works if you view the image files directly, not as part of a Web page. IE 6 also supports an improved Print Preview function, which allows frames or full-page printing to be selected via the Print Preview window, rather than diving back to the Print dialog.

Those of you who took a look at the preview versions of IE 6, or read about Microsoft's plans for the product, might be surprised to learn that a few things have been dropped from the final release. The controversial Smart Tags have gone, which would have allowed Microsoft to spot words on your Web pages and insert links to other sites of its choice. The previously integrated MSN Messenger has also gone.

As a Web browser, IE 6 is good. IE 5.5 is acknowledged to be a great browser, and IE 6 is much the same product. If anything, it's even more stable, especially when running under XP. Speed is a moot point - some things seem faster than IE5.5, others slower. Overall, however, speed is much the same.

Author: Paul Ockenden