Tech No Babel
Created | Updated Jul 11, 2003
Microsoft have recently released 'Internet Explorer 6' onto the general market. It's been available for Beta testing for a few months but now, as with all good marketing releases, it's starting to make it's way to the general public on those freebie CDs on the front of computer magazines. You really know a browser has hit mainstream, though, once it starts being given away on coasters, otherwise known as AOL CDs.
So, is it any good? Is it actually any different from IE5?
Initially it doesn't look that much different, a bit smoother perhaps. The icons for it are a little more rounded and picturesque, but that hardly makes a good browser. Once you get down to using it though you notice how it runs smoother as well.
The first thing I noticed about it was the addition of a new button in the toolbar, 'Media'. Clicking it brings up a snazzy little side bar as with the 'Favourites' and 'History' parts of IE5 and similar to that of the Mozilla and Netscape 6 ilk, and clicks you straight into the WindowsMedia.com sub site with links to Music, Radio and Video sections. This side bar also lets you set it up so that you can listen to online radio stations within it, and not interfere with your browsing, saving you the hassle of having to open up another browser window. I think that this was planned for IE5, because that could only manage so many windows at a time before it got confused. It also seems to tailor the Media section to the area of the globe that you live in, I was getting a list of radio stations in the UK. So, if they know where in the world you are, I would like to see them spell 'Favorites' with a 'u'!
IE6 doesn't have the problem of crashing because of multiple windows that IE5 did. I've opened up numerous browser windows and haven't managed to crash it yet.
Another thing that jumps out at you as a new feature (not a bug) is an 'Image Toolbar'. If you leave your mouse pointer over an image, this little bar pops up allowing you to save the image to disk, print it, email it to some one or open up your 'My Pictures' folder. You can basically do these things by right clicking on a picture already, so I'm not sure why this has been built in. Perhaps it makes it a little quicker to copy artwork from the web... but it doesn't seem to work on all pictures. I haven't figured out yet which ones do and which ones don't work on it, although it seems to be something to do with the size of the image. Which leads to the introduction of automatic image resizing. If the picture you load is larger than the browser window, then IE6 will resize the picture to fit. That at least could be handy but I'm not sure if you're able to turn it off like the image toolbar as I haven't found out how to yet. Mostly because I'm now unsure if it's on or not.
A good addition to the browser is a little icon in the status bar, the strip at the bottom of the screen. It tells you when and if IE6 has blocked off third party cookies. Those annoying things that have nothing to do with the website that you're actually looking at. Mostly these are used as visitor trackers. A very welcome new addition is alongside the 'Delete Files' button, you now have a 'Delete Cookies' button. Great, clears all your unwanted cookies in one go. Unfortunately you can't configure it to not delete certain cookies, like your h2g2 one. So you have to keep logging in again each time you use this.
Internet Explorer 6 comes bundled with 'Outlook Express 6', which I'm not sure is a good thing.
Okay, Outlook Express has to be one of the simplest email programmes around, if only because it's the one most people are familiar with. The thing that I'm not keen on is that you seem to have no choice but to upgrade to Outlook Express 6 when you upgrade to IE6, and Outlook Express 6 seems to run a little bit slower. I have no idea why, but it does.
Not much of a griping point, I know, but my main gripe with OE6 is that it also automatically installs the 'Microsoft Messenger' thingy. And can you select it as a separate bit to uninstall? Not easily. You have to go into your Control Panel and the Add/Remove Programmes bit and remove it from there. Okay Microsoft, we're using your products, but please don't force others upon us.
All in all Internet Explorer 6 is a smoother running version of IE5. I wouldn't say it was worth downloading all sixty odd megs of it to install, unless you have a fast connection, but if you happen to come across it on a coaster, then definitely do.
