IE5, an upgrade you shouldn't forego

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Perhaps not many controversies in history are as likely to draw as much media attention as Microsoft. Some, notably competitors and the "only bad news is news" people in the media industry, despise the company and applaud the U.S. Department of Justice's actions against it. Others, including some computer users, stand up for it. The computer community is divided. Some see Microsoft's domination as a blessing, because it brings standardization. Others see it as a curse, because monopoly usually tends to hamper innovation. The debates rage on and on.

However, I happen to agree with Fred Langa, who writes in the June issue Windows magazine, that, no matter how we may feel about the company, we must accept that some of Microsoft's products are simply "best-of-class", as he puts it. Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) is one of those products. Fred is not the only one who says that you should be using IE5 now. In fact, many others who were early reviewers back his opinion.

I've been using IE4 since my Day One as a subscriber to CBN. Just recently, courtesy of PT Microsoft Indonesia, I got a copy of IE5 on a CD-ROM. I installed it, and when I ran it I knew immediately why people rave so much about it. It's noticeably faster, it has more features and yet is simpler to use. I'm not going to return to IE4.

Not just a face-lift

Although quite a few of us get on the Net just for entertainment, the majority of users still get online to hunt for information. Therefore, any improvement that makes searching easier and quicker will be highly welcome. In IE5, search tools are amply available. You can even search the websites that you have visited in the past by typing a keyword in the History pane.

For example, to get back quickly to the pages where you saw the articles on improving your brain power late last night, all you have to do is click on the History button. When the history pane appears on the left of the screen, click on the Search button, type in the word "brain power" and hit Enter. You'll get the list of the pages back

A click on the Search button will bring up the Search pane on the left of the Browse pane. We can search for a Web page, find someone's address, find a map, find a picture, find a business or look through previous searches. We can customize IE5 built-in Search tool so that it also summons the help of search engines including MSN Web Search, InfoSeek AltaVista, Lycos, GoTo, Excite, Yahoo!, Euroseek and Northern Light. If we prefer, we can choose only one search service for all searchers.

We can even type in our keyword in the URL address box. Just for the heck of it, I typed in cendol instead of www.xxx.com, and lo and behold! MSN Autosearch gives me a list of 25 pages with the word cendol in it, including Bakmi Gang Kelinci's drinks menu. That's neat. At least you know now where to go if you crave cendol.

The browsing history itself can be viewed based on dates or frequency of visits (most often visited pages will appear on top of the list). We can also have History show the list of pages we visited today. Or we can simply list all the sites we have visited, if we care to look at them at all.

The Favorites has been revamped as well. It is now much easier to organize the list of our bookmarks by putting them in different folders, adding and deleting pages and selecting which of them should be made available offline. Click on a favorite site that we've bookmarked, and we'll be able to see its properties, including how many times we've been there.

IE5 adds to the reasons of why we wish we had a permanent connection to the Internet. I tried out the new Radio Tuner, and the experience is quite awesome. No, it's not as crystal clear as the sound of a B&O receiver, but at least we can listen to a number of U.S. as well as international radio stations, including BBC and ZDTV radio. I grow even envious of the Singaporean who can now enjoy high bandwidth ASDL connection provided by Magix. The Web radio broadcast must be very clear over there.

Saving private pages

It is now much easier to save a page on our hard disk, too. Just click on the File menu item, and then on Save as. We can choose to save the entire page, as an HTML file or as a text-only file to save space. Unfortunately, file management is not available yet, and that should be on our wish list.

It's also now very easy to mark pages to be downloaded automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, or any time we tell IE5 to synchronize the page, so that we can read them offline. That helps us save on telephone pulses and Internet access charges.

No less useful is Microsoft's inclusion of the Alexa service with IE5. Click on the Related button, IE5 will call the Alexa service and list in the What's Related pane a list of pages related to the one that we're viewing. This provides us with additional information that we can use. For example, when I was viewing a BMW site to admire its sexy new K 1200 LT motorcycle, clicking on the Related button on the far right end of IE toolbar gave me a list of 10 other sites containing information about motorcycles, including Harley Davidson's and Kawasaki's websites.

Finally, don't forget that our very much treasured Outlook Express has been improved a lot, too. The new Identity feature, for example, enables us to maintain our privacy even when our PC is shared with other workers in the office. People won't be able to access our e-mail unless they know the password.

You'll be reading more about using IE5 and Outlook Express in this column. For now, log on and upgrade your Explorer if you're still using IE4. Just remember to select the right version of IE5 for your Windows, as you'll surely have problems installing IE5 for Win 98 on a Win 95 system.