About This Particular Macintosh 6.04 - eDisk

hand cursor. This is the kind of feature that makes you wonder why no one thought of itbefore.The Open Location command now gives the location bar keyboard focus instead of poppingup the open location window. Even cooler, if the location bar is hidden, Open Location willreveal it and hide it again after you’ve entered the URL. Also, IE 5 fixes one of my longstandingcomplaints: a page in the process of loading no longer overwrites a URL that you’reentering with its own.Finally, you can now (optionally) use Tab to select links and form items in Web pages. IEuses a colored focus box to show which item will be selected when you press return, andlinks that you follow retain the focus ring until the new page has loaded, making it clearwhich link you clicked on.Help and SupportIE still does not have extensive balloon help, and it still uses online HTML help. Althoughthe help works, I find it more clumsy to use than PDF, QuickHelp, or Apple Help. It is noteasily searchable, and if you’ve disabled JavaScript most of the online help is inexplicablyinaccessible. Besides this, the online help is generally not very helpful. It has a tendency todescribe what you see on the screen without explaining how to use the various functions.Getting support from Microsoft is not easy. There is no address you can email to get technicalsupport. Instead, you must obtain a Passport and wade through Microsoft’s online supportsite to ask your question using an HTML form. Since IE 5 was crashing so much, Idecided to do this with iCab, only to find that Microsoft’s support site doesn’t work with it.(In addition, the support site makes no mention of IE 5 for the Mac, and the section thatasks you to describe your machine configuration does not include an option for the G4 processor.)After about fifteen minutes of jumping through hoops, I finally got my question(about IE 5’s stability) sent off. Later that evening I received an email response asking me tospecify whether I obtained IE 5 with a new computer or on CD. Not only was this responseunhelpful, but it was also a stupid question: since IE 5 had only been released the day before,how could it have been bundled with a new Mac?I answered the question anyway, then heard nothing for two days (despite the fact thatMicrosoft promises a 24-hour response time). On the third day, I received a helpful replyfrom a Macintosh support person. It suggested trashing the IE preferences, the InternetATPM 6.04 ← 104 →Stuff: Internet Explorer 5.0