Product Reviews

What would you expect from a Web browser made by Microsoft? A QuickTime movie of Bill Gates every time you log on? An interface splattered with Windows logos to make you and your Mac feel unwanted? Well, think again. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 2.1 is remarkably Mac friendly, more so in certain respects than Netscape Navigator. What's more, it actually trounces Navigator in quite a few areas of performance, including the all-important wallet benchmark because - for now at least - Internet Explorer is free, while Netscape Navigator will set you back about £70.

When Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 2.0 just a few months ago, the best thing about it was its small size and modest memory requirement compared with Netscape Navigator. Today, the contrast is even more marked. Explorer 2.1 takes up 1.8Mb on disk and has a preferred RAM allocation of around 5Mb. Meanwhile, Netscape Navigator just keeps growing - the new beta release of version 3.0 is more than double the size of Internet Explorer and expects more than twice as much memory.

Netscape has enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the browser market (about 90% according to some estimates), and this has allowed it to consolidate its position still further by introducing unofficial or 'extended' HTML tags. As a result, the Web is littered with pages that only work effectively if viewed in Navigator. By the time other browsers catch up, Netscape has made even more additions.

Faced with such a legacy of Netscape-only material, Microsoft had no choice but to pursue compatibility. And it has done so superbly. Not only can you import all your Netscape bookmarks, but Internet Explorer 2.1 also supports most of Netscape's HTML features, including frames, background patterns, text colour and tables. Download the same page - even a page that says it's optimised for Netscape only - and it will look virtually identical in both browsers. Playing Netscape at its own game, Microsoft has also added some tags that it has created, including one to play background sounds and one to determine text font.

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area where Netscape has made the Web its own is in the development of plug-ins. These are pieces of code, mostly produced by third parties, which let you display all sorts of multimedia content within the Browser window. The number of available plug-ins is growing daily, but some, such as Macromedia's Shockwave, Adobe PDF and RealAudio, are already established as essential accessories for surfers. Again, Microsoft has achieved an excellent level of compatibility. Of the popular plug-ins only MacZilla didn't work with Internet Explorer. The rest were fine - crashing occasionally, but no more so than in Navigator.

In some cases you may not need to use plug-ins at all because Internet Explorer supports several multimedia file formats, including WAV, AIFF and MIDI sounds, as well as QuickTime and AVI movies. Version 2.1 also adds a built-in QuickTime VR player.

With many companies issuing Internet software as fast as they can write it and leaving the testing to the punters, it would be too much to hope that any Web browser might actually work reliably. But Internet Explorer 2.1 is noticeably more stable than version 2.0 and seems also to be at least as stable as Navigator 2.0.

Overall download times are on a par with Navigator, but Internet Explorer feels faster because it gets its priorities right - for example, displaying all the text before it starts fiddling about with the images. If faced with a large, embedded image, Internet Explorer often throws in a generic fixed-size placeholder and then adjusts the page when the image is available. This can lead to some slightly disconcerting effects as the page re-arranges itself, but it does mean that you waste a lot less time.

One area where Netscape Navigator has always been clumsy is in its handling of bookmarks. In particular, if you want to rename a bookmark, Navigator makes you open a separate Edit window, whereas in Internet Explorer you can just click on the name and edit it directly. Another excellent feature is the History window, which retains a record of every page visited across multiple sessions up to a maximum of 10,000 entries. You can also drag items from History to Favourites (Microsoft's name for bookmarks), which is a useful way of updating your bookmarks off line.

Internet Explorer is at least as good as Navigator in most areas, and often better. One of the few weaknesses is that it doesn't yet support Java or Java Script, both of which are available in Navigator 3.0. That aside, there's not much to complain about. In the long term, Netscape may regain the lead, but for now it's worth downloading a free copy of Internet Explorer to try out.