Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 Microsoft Corp. 1 Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 800-426-9400; 206-882-8080 www.microsoft.com/ie4
Support: Live, toll-free phone support for first 90 days, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays (PT); paid per-incident support available afterward
Requires: 64MB hard drive space (full installation); Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0
List Price: Free download; $4.95 for CD-ROM
The Active Desktop looks and acts like a Web page and can integrate Active Content, like this stock ticker and ZD Net news headline.
Two or three years ago, when many of us first got to the Web, all we really needed was a simple browser to explore this new world. Now, however, life on the Net is more complex. There are millions of sites to visit, many search engines to use, and advances like push technology delivering more and more information to our desktops.
Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 4.0 has responded to these rapid changes by evolving into a rich suite of Internet tools. Besides its browser, it now includes integration with the Windows operating system, an e-mail client, built-in push technology, and tools for collaborating over the Web.
This update has received a lot of attention because of its push technology and because of how it merges with the Windows 95 operating system. We found both capabilities potentially useful but initially baffling.
One of Internet Explorer's most useful advances is in its offline browsing capability. You can now download a site automatically to your hard drive for viewing at any time by dragging the URL to a special folder. You can also set options for downloading, including a download scheduler. However, it permits you to download only one page at a time, unlike other offline browsers, which let you download multiple pages of a large site at one time.
Active Channels bring customized push content to your browser, such as business news that is tailored by you to be specific to your industry. At this writing, Internet Explorer boasts about 300 precreated Active Channels. You subscribe to a channel by right-clicking its listing in the Channels Explorer Bar and, in the menu that appears, choosing the Subscribe option.
The much-ballyhooed Active Desktop makes your Windows environment behave like a Web page and is supposed to allow you to navigate it just as easily. Essentially, this desktop integration is really a series of Windows 95 interface enhancements that changes the look and feel of your desktop. It isn't a magical interaction between the PC and the Web as Microsoft implies (at least not yet), but rather a series of interface refinements.
With these refinements, you can make small changes, like optionally setting the desktop so that you need only single-click on desktop options instead of double-clicking; or you can modify your operating system in more significant and useful ways, like adding your list of favorite Web sites to the Start menu, adding a Web address bar to the taskbar, or placing your favorite URLs on your taskbar.
Active Desktop also can deliver push content directly into small windows that appear on your desktop. These windows can provide updated information such as news and stock tickers, or contain simple utilities like an onscreen clock. Information providers, such as news sites, must create these desktop window applications, which you can download from either the content provider's Web site or from Microsoft's Web site. You control which content windows appear on the desktop from a tab that Internet Explorer adds to the Windows 95 Display Properties dialog box.
If all this push technology and the Active Desktop sound confusing, you're right. It took us awhile to understand the differences between the various types of information that Internet Explorer could push to our desktop, and once we did understand, we still didn't find it particularly useful. Although the push channels included solid information providers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, most of the channels provided only lightweight information and entertainment. Much of the time, it feels like clutter with no real value.
Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator compete more comparably in push technology. Internet Explorer's push content takes some getting used to, but its overall setup is still simpler than Netscape Netcaster's. Then again, Netcaster comes with 700 preset channels, which is more than twice what Internet Explorer offers.
The browser remains at the core of Internet Explorer. We found Internet Explorer easier to use than its competitor and the market leader, Netscape Navigator. We particularly appreciated the usability of its new Explorer Bar feature for speeding World Wide Web navigation.
The Explorer Bar consists of frames on the left side of the browser window that display specific types of navigational information. For instance, if you click on the Favorites button in the toolbar, an Explorer Bar frame opens on the left, displaying your list of favorite Web sites. Click on a link, and the corresponding site appears in a larger, main viewing window to your right. Since the Explorer Bar is always open, you can switch to new sites or go back and forth with single mouse clicks instead of navigating through the regular Favorites menu.
The most useful Explorer Bar contains a list of popular search engines such as Infoseek and Yahoo, and a text box for entering your query; the search results also appear in the Explorer Bar. This is much faster than the old method of finding a site, trying it out, and clicking the Back button until you return to the search results page where you can link to another site.
Another application included with Internet Explorer is a completely revamped e-mail and newsgroup client called Outlook Express. Outlook Express has three viewing panes: One displays folders and subfolders in which you can store messages, another displays the contents of folders, and a third displays the contents of messages. Outlook Express has a solid feature set, including advanced mail-management features like the ability to create rules for routing messages automatically to the appropriate folders based on content.
Both Netscape and Microsoft claim that their respective e-mail clients are vastly superior to the other's, but we preferred Outlook Express to Netscape Messenger because of the onscreen drag-and-drop folders for storing messages, and the ability to import addresses from the Windows 95 Messaging Inbox and Microsoft Outlook 97.
Rounding out Internet Explorer is NetMeeting, which you can use for collaborating over the Web in real time. Specifically, you can chat either with voice or text in real time, perform rudimentary videoconferencing, use an application on a remote computer, or conduct "whiteboarding" sessions in which you can create collaborative whiteboard diagrams with somebody in another location. To connect to the other party, you log on to a server that supports NetMeeting. (Microsoft maintains such a server for public use.) After you log on to the server, it displays a list of other NetMeeting users who are logged on. Once you find the person with whom you want to communicate, you click on a button and you can begin communicating.
Microsoft NetMeeting and Netscape Conference are equally easy to use, but NetMeeting supports videoconferencing, and Conference does not. In addition, NetMeeting enables you to run an application on a remote computer.
Also included is FrontPage Express, a simplified version of Microsoft's FrontPage Web authoring tool that is missing the Web site administration capabilities of the stand-alone version.
The only feature that Netscape Communicator 4 has that Internet Explorer doesn't is Netscape Calendar, a full-featured group scheduling program that doesn't have a sister application in Internet Explorer. In addition, notebook users may hesitate to install Internet Explorer because of its size; the full installation, including such features as NetMeeting and Microsoft FrontPage Express, takes up 59MB on your hard drive. Finally, the desktop integration features tend to slow down many last-generation PCs.
The Internet has grown rapidly in the past couple of years, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 has grown with it. Once an also-ran browser, it now is a compelling suite of sophisticated products for anybody who uses the Internet. Internet Explorer drastically changes the way you look at and access the information in your computer and on the Internet.
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