About This Particular Macintosh 6.04 - eDisk

than blanking out the first one with white first. IE 5 also feels more responsive: Dynamicscrolling is smoother, and the delay after you tell IE to close a window has been reduced.IE 5 is definitely faster than Netscape. Depending on the page and connection speed, it’sanywhere from noticeably faster than IE 4.5 to almost indistinguisably faster. Its speed iscomparable to iCab’s. For small and medium pages, IE 5 is perhaps a bit quicker to finish therendering of the page, but iCab is the first to draw some text that you can read. For large files,especially ones stored locally, IE 5 is dramatically slower than iCab. In all cases, I found itmuch slower than IE 5 for Windows.Stability and Good System CitizenshipWeb browsers are notoriously unstable, and people tend to have different experience withwhich browsers are stable and which aren’t. In the past, IE has always been rock-solid forme, while Netscape was flaky. With IE 5, I’m sorry to say, that that tradition is over. In myfirst day of using it IE crashed numerous times, six of them requiring immediate restarts thatcaused me to lose unsaved changes in other applications. I have never experienced a Macapplication that is so unstable. To be fair, I installed IE 5 on another machine that containeda clean installation of Mac OS 9. IE was more stable there, but still managed to crash seventimes while I was writing this review. My experiences with IE’s stability seem to be unusualbut not unheard of. Many people find it quite solid, but enough are having instability problemsthat I think Microsoft needs to pay serious attention to its quality control. Certainpages such as Outside Online 10 cause immediate crashes for all IE 5 users, so there are definitelyissues that need to be resolved.As in IE 4.x, IE 5 uses a modest memory partition in its Get Info window and asks the systemfor additional temporary memory as needed. You can find out how much memory IE isusing by choosing “About This Computer” from the Apple menu. IE 4 had serious memoryleaks; if you visited enough pages, it would lose track of some of the memory it was usingand keep asking the system for more, until there was none left. IE 5’s memory usage stillgradually increases as you use the program, but it doesn’t leak fast enough to be a seriousproblem. Nevertheless, every once in a while it mysteriously causes my Finder to run out ofmemory even when there are 250 MB of unallocated RAM.10. http://www.outsidemag.comATPM 6.04 ← 95 →Stuff: Internet Explorer 5.0