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Internet Explorer 5 Preview

Early release speeds downloads and adds authoring improvements.

By Paul Heltzel, PCWorld   

Microsoft says it%squots making the beta available so that developers can get a head start with new features that have been introduced, such as improvements to dynamic HTML and the ability to display pages without the browser interface.

For the rest of us, IE5 looks a lot like IE4. The interface has just a few revamped features. But some features do stand out:

IE5 now offers an option to save the text and all the elements of a Web page to your hard drive. The interface for organizing favorites has been redesigned and now lets you sort bookmarks alphabetically and more easily reorder bookmarks and folders. It%squots too early to say whether this new design will prove more useful.

The browser now allows file uploading via drag-and-drop FTP, so you don%squott need a separate program to copy files to an Internet server. In addition, this latest release loads the data into a table before drawing the rest of the page, which should improve the speed of table-heavy pages.

And by offering enhanced support for XML, the program can retain the %dquotstate%dquot of a page, which means you can return to a page the way you left it. For instance, you can bookmark a page with frames and go right back to the frameset you left, not all the way back to the beginning. Or you could bypass your login on a free mail account by bookmarking the frameset that shows your in-box. This is a nice touch and potentially a real timesaver.

All the changes we%squotve seen so far look like improvements over the last version. Caution is advised however, since this pie%squots not quite baked; we%squotve used the preview release without crashing for several hours, but anyone who%squots suffered data loss from dealing with an early browser release should know better than to use this software on a machine with irreplaceable data.