About This Particular Macintosh 6.04 - eDisk

Config preferences, and several of IE 5’s shared libraries. I followed the advice, and IE is nowmore stable on my main machine. However, it still crashes from time to time, and of coursethis procedure brought no improvement to my second machine that contained the cleaninstall.IE 5 vs. IE 4 vs. Netscape vs. iCabMost users will prefer IE 5 to its predecessor, and in my opinion it’s several steps ahead of thelatest offering from Netscape. IE has a better interface than Netscape, it’s faster, it rendersbetter, and it has features like the history and download manager that I find essential. Aboutthe only reason to use Netscape is if you prefer the integrated approach of Communicator orfrequent Web sites that only work in Netscape. (These are few and far between, but I keep acopy of Netscape around and use it from time to time.)Surprisingly, perhaps, IE 5’s main competition comes from iCab. iCab is in many casesfaster than IE 5, and it uses substantially less memory and disk space. It doesn’t put anythingin your System Folder, and it works on 68K Macs. Although IE has improved its usabilitysince version 4.5, it still lags behind iCab in that area. It cannot stop animated GIFs, opennew windows when you Command-click URLs in other applications, or open new windowsin the background. Although IE has flashy rollovers and transparency, iCab has superiorcursor hinting; it subtly changes the arrow cursor to indicate whether clicking will open anew window or download a link to disk. Unlike iCab, IE won’t let you view source in BBEditor automatically reload a page when you save it in BBEdit. Finally, it lacks iCab features suchas image filtering, kiosk mode, local search paths, and the standard links toolbar.ConclusionIE 5 has many improvements over the previous version, most notably the Tasman renderingengine, with its increased speed and support for Internet standards. I commend Microsoftfor doing the right thing with regard to supporting HTML, CSS, and the DOM. It’s the mostcompatible browser out there, and for this reason I think even Netscape and iCab users willfind it useful now and then.IE’s default resolution and font size are bound to cause problems for users and Web developers,and I hope Microsoft will fix them with a maintenance update. Although the new interfacecontains some nice usability enhancements, plenty more need to be added, and somekey bugs must be fixed before I can recommend IE 5 to everyone. For now, I believe iCab isATPM 6.04 ← 105 →Stuff: Internet Explorer 5.0