March 31st, 2000
Internet Explorer 5 Introduction Internet Explorer 5 is the latest upgrade for Microsoft's key Internet browsing application. It has several new features, a faster browsing experience and an enhanced user interface.
Installation Installation follows the pattern Mac users got familiar with when Microsoft released Office 98. You just drag and drop the folder from a disk (in this case, a disk image) to anywhere you want on your hard disk drive. When you launch IE for the first time, the "first run" application will dump a bunch of libraries in the system folder and create the preference files needed to run. If any of those files is missing or gets corrupted later, the application will launch again to fix them.
Interface changes Internet Explorer has undergone major cosmetic reconstruction. Before, it used to be Appearance-savvy, but now it imposes its very own looks, sporting the famous lines found on iMac plastics and also in the up and coming Mac OS X Aqua interface. When Apple's operating system of the future comes out, Aqua and IE 5 will match perfectly. Something tells me that this is not coincidence...
The big deal about IE's interface is its customization possibilities. The default toolbar, aka the Button Bar, can be changed at will by moving the buttons around, adding and removing them and inserting separators. This is excellent since it helps to personalize the browser according to your own needs. For simplicity lovers, there are two simple predefined sets available. But that's not all. The color of the buttons can change. The options available are:
This is handy, especially for power users who prefer to enhance their interface with Kaleidoscope color schemes or Apple themes. The colors can also match the colors of a Mac's case. A welcome addition is the collapse button just on top of the Explorer bar. This arrow lets you get rid of all the toolbars to use the full length of the browsing window to visit sites using the Favorites menu. It leaves four small tool buttons: forward, back, refresh and stop.
As if this wasn't enough, the interface hands you the key to a lot of power with the improved Favorites toolbar. You can use simple Favorites but also FOLDERS that you fill with Favorites. For example (see screenshot), you can group sites by categories like sports or news sites. This lets you place more links in less space, this maximizing the use of your bar. Neat.
Performance Microsoft boasts that its new rendering engine, code named Tasman, is really fast. In part, this is true. A speed test against Communicator 4.7, however, gives mixed results. In order to maximize performance, here are the conditions used for both browsers:
The Mac Observer's home page is heavy with tables and images, thus difficult to render, and Internet Explorer beats Netscape easily in that field. The second page about MySQL is very long, with loads of text, and IE 5 choked on it, leaving Communicator with a clear edge. The third page, aside from being about a popular actress, combines a lot of text and several small images, and Netscape wins, most probably because its text rendering performance outdoes Explorer. Yahoo's home page is probably one of the most simple Web pages on the Internet and it's amazing how IE smoked Communicator on this one. The last, Scott's Web page, is a complicated one filled with JavaScript, and as you can see, Communicator was quicker. From the speed test results, Explorer seems more powerful at handling complex pages with tables and images, but Netscape Communicator beats it to pieces when rendering text. Although the latter was faster on one more page than IE, it is hard to call a clear winner since each browser has strengths and weaknesses. That said, Tasman, the new rendering engine, works nicely and outperforms IE 4.5 easily, especially in long browsing sessions since the browser doesn't slow down as much as it did in the past.
New features
Other minor additions include:
Noteworthy Some of these are not all new, but they are useful anyway. The browsing history is so nice. It groups sites by the day they were visited for future reference while Netscape's history is just a file used for the auto complete feature in the location bar. The Explorer bar is better than before, since the panes were replaced with a solid bar, which makes it more pleasing to the eye. The contextual menus are slightly better, offering the right items at the right places. The icons look much better, especially the Explorer throbber in the top right corner of the browser. Who used that spinning globe anyway? The AutoFill Forms feature is time saving and very handy. Of course, the fact that IE remembers your passwords for password protected web pages is lovely. It saves the time taken for those additional keystrokes but the double edged sword shows when you risk forgetting a new password after entering it only once...
Stability problem IE 5 can crash when used at the same time as its e-mail companion, Outlook Express 5.02. During the testing, IE got multiple errors of Type 2, 3 and 11 when OE was active, and suddenly stopped throwing those alerts once Outlook was closed. Otherwise, Explorer showed stability throughout the tests.
Conclusion Internet Explorer 5 is solid. While not perfect, it adds a lot of new features and the enhancements are numerous. While we are still waiting for a whole new Netscape Communicator, IE takes the lead in the browser war with more features, better respect of Web standards and speedier Web page delivery than before. Its usability edge over Communicator is not dramatic, but for the moment, IE is ahead.
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