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Microsoft recently unleashed the successor to it's Internet Explorer 4.5 for the Macintosh. IE 5 is not only better than the previous Mac version... It's better than the latest Windows version as well.

The browser is the program which lets users access and display web sites. Netscape was once the leader, its browser being used by 90 percent of everyone surfing the Net. But Netscape has seen its dominance fizzle to about 30 percent after Microsoft stepped into the picture. IE owns around 70 percent of the market and IE 5 for the Mac shows that Microsoft isn't sitting on its laurels.

Netscape recently released its first beta version of Navigator 6 in its effort to update its aging version 4 but the final release isn't expected until sometime in the third or fourth quarter. And Netscape has its work cut out for it as it tries to keep up with the ever expanding shadow of the Microsoft browser. But Netscape's alliance with America Online which makes it AOL's default browser may help it gain more acceptance. We shall see.

In the meantime, IE 5 for the Mac offers many new features, the most important of which is speed. Its new enhanced display engine renders web pages much faster than its predecessor. An interesting ability of IE 5's display engine is that it can emulate older browser display technology if it comes across a web site that favors older browsers.

A new feature found exclusively in Macintosh IE 5 is the Auction Manager. If you've ever wished there was an easier way to monitor online auction sites like Ebay, you'll appreciate this new feature. Basically, it lets you check the status of an auction and visit other Web pages without having to constantly return to the original auction site. Auction Manager will notify you when you are no longer the highest bidder or when the bidding is over. It also provides a list of the auctions you are tracking, the time remaining to place bids and the name of the highest bidder.

Too often Macintosh users were excluded from participating in a Web site because their browsers didn't support some of the newer display technology. IE 5 now fully supports HTML 4 and CSS-1 standards. But Internet developers aren't sitting still either and there are always newer and better standards being created. So it's not unusually for browsers, regardless of their platform, to lag behind. Given that scenario, Macintosh IE 5 can only partially support newer display standards such as XML, CSS-2 and DOM-1.

Other new features let you customize the tool bar. You can drag and drop, and arrange a variety of utility icons such as Preferences, Refresh and even the Sherlock 2 search application. These can be placed one at a time or create sets of tools to be interchanged all at once. You can even choose from several different eye candy color themes such as Grape and Strawberry.

The other new feature is the Internet Scrapbook. This allows you to take a "snapshot" of any web page and store it in a sortable index. Scrapbook pages can then be viewed at a later time, even if you are not online. Of course, getting IE 5 is a no brainer because its free. Just go to the Microsoft web site, download it and make your Windows colleagues jealous once again.

Microsoft, Inc.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/ie