When I originally heard that Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 6 would be released within a couple of weeks of each other, I thought of doing a comparison review.

Of course, as most readers will be aware, while IE 5 debuted as a final release product, Netscape 6 it turned out to be an early beta or even an alpha release. It would simply be unfair to do a head-to-head comparison of the two products at Netscape 6's present stage of development.

So I decided instead to do a sort of overview "state of the browser" article, comparing and IE 5, iCab, and Netscape 4.72, and also taking a look at Netscape 6 and its potential for the future.

Internet Explorer 5

IE 5 has received an overwhelmingly positive reception from the Mac community, although not from everyone. I am one of the skeptics. In my case it's not anti-Microsoft bigotry. I quite liked IE 4.5, despite its bugginess, and I used it as my main browser for a while until the iCab betas became dependable.

However, I have not warmed to IE 5. It's faster than IE 4.5, and somewhat less buggy, although I still find it the crankiest of the three major Mac browsers. It's the only one of the three that crashes my Mac with significant regularity, and it's inconsistent in performance -- road-runner quick on some pages, draggy-slow on others, and occasionally it refuses to load a page altogether -- or at least within the bounds of my patience.

I keep IE 5 open, and use it every day for some tasks, but I don't have the confidence in it that I have developed with Netscape and iCab. I'm never sure how IE 5 will behave. The other two browsers are rocks of stability and predictability by comparison.

Then there's IE 5's looks, which IMHO are a step in the wrong direction from IE 4.5, which I quite liked aesthetically. I do not like IE 5's new icons, or the gi-normous "@" handles scattered about the interface window. and menus. These are drag handles, and functionally useful, but did they have to be so ugly?

The IE 5 look is frequently described as "Aqua," a la Apple's forthcoming OS X user interface, however, it is not Aqua despite a superficial resemblance. In fact, you can choose from nine different interface color themes in IE 5, including all seven iMac colors (five fruit flavors plus Bondi and Graphite), plus PowerBook Bronze and PowerBook Black. Unfortunately, some of the colors are pretty muddy-looking, especially Tangerine -- which one reader described, accurately, as "poopy brown," as well as a very murky-looking Strawberry. I settled for the default Blueberry in the end.

One new feature I like very much in IE 5 is the facility to put Favorites folders inside the Toolbar Favorites folder. This is very slick, and also supported by the latest iCab 2.0 public beta. Good stuff carried over from IE 4.5 includes the download manager, persistent history, and the flexible way IE handles Favorites. IE also still starts up very quickly.

Much has been made of Microsoft's implementation of the HTML 4 and CSS 1 Web standards in the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer 5. This is doubtless a good thing, and probably appreciated by folks who frequent Websites where those standards have significance. That's not any place where I go to regularly, so it's not a big deal to me in terms of my own surfing -- at least yet.

IE 5 has added a fifth, "Scrapbook" category to the collection of pop-out window categories on the left side of the main browser window, which will no doubt be a convenience for people who use such things. I never got around to using the ones in IE 4.5, and don't miss them in the slightest in Netscape and iCab, either.

There are a lot of other bells and whistles in IE 5 for folks who like that sort of thing. You can customize the toolbars by adding alternate or extra buttons, or even complete sets of buttons from a library provided and dropping it/them onto the toolbar. You can also move a button on the Button Bar by holding down the Command key, or delete it by dragging to the Trash.

IE 5 also includes an Auction Manager that can monitor online auctions for you. You can easily check the status of an auction and visit other Web pages without having to return to the original auction site. You can also have the Auction Manager notify you when there are high-bid changesÊ— such as when you are no longer the highest bidderÊ— and when an auction closes. If you're an auction buff, that will likely be a helpful feature.

There is a convenient text zoom feature that allows you to display text in size increments from 50% to 300%

Personally, I rarely use the bells and whistles, and I'm more interested in speed and stability. As I noted above, IE 5 is more than respectably fast most of the time, but suffers a bit in the stability department compared with its competitors.

This is a good browser, so question, and it's no mystery why so many Mac users are happy with it, but it just doesn't click with me in terms of enthusiasm.

More --

Part 1 of 4: Internet Explorer 5
Part 2 of 4: Netscape Communicator 4.72
Part 3 of 4: iCab Preview 2.0
Part 4 of 4: Netscape 6 - The Future, and Summary

Charles W. Moore

.

Saturday, 26-May-2012 16:28:25 EDT