Internet Explorer 4

Internet Explorer 4 (IE 4) is more than just a new browser. It's a statement by Microsoft that the browser isn't just an application anymore. It's also a user interface, an enterprise programming platform, and a central administration tool to move your network closer to Zero Administration for Windows. (ZAW is Microsoft's initiative to control the total cost of ownership. It will be part of Windows NT 5.0.) The new features that have made IE 4 the next generation of Internet tools include its new active desktop user interface (UI), a new language (a proprietary version of Java), new Web user tools (channels and subscriptions), new Web development capabilities (Dynamic HTML--DHTML--and FrontPad), new communications capabilities (Outlook Express and NetMeeting), and a new administration tool (Internet Explorer Administration Kit--IEAK).

The Browser and the UI Meet
At first glance, Microsoft's talk about integrating the browser and the UI in IE 4 appears to have been just that--talk. The new active desktop doesn't look all that different from an ordinary Win95 or NT 4.0 desktop. A closer look, however, reveals subtle differences. The captions under icons now change color when you let the cursor hover over them. As with many Web sites' hot spots, the captions are underlined to show that you can click that icon to initiate an action. And you don't double-click the icon. You just single-click it. Single-clicking is great for sufferers of repetitive stress injury (such as carpal tunnel syndrome), but it takes a little getting used to.

The procedure for selecting disjointed items is different as well. Instead of simply control-clicking each item that you want to select, you must first put the cursor over each item that you want to select, wait for its caption to highlight, and then control-click. Similarly, you can't just click and drag an item to the Recycle Bin to delete it--the click would open it. Instead, you must first move the cursor over the item, wait for the caption to highlight, and then drag it to the Recycle Bin. Basic housekeeping tasks take longer with this extra highlighting step, but I might eventually figure out faster ways to get those tasks done.

To really see where the browser meets the UI, open up the My Computer folder. This folder has a distinct new look (as Screen 1 shows), with a gradient background and a report of disk size, used space, and free space. A more significant change is that My Computer is built on the fly as a script (either JavaScript or Visual Basic Script--VBScript). I couldn't modify that script, but I could create and attach any script to any other folder. For example, I could add scripts to my Games folder so that it had a comic book background bitmap and played alien ray gun WAV files when opened. Or I could write a script to modify what the folders look like. You can use scripting to modify much of the look and feel of the UI, which might be a frightening prospect for consultants and support staff.

The Browser and the UI Meet Again
The browser and the UI meet in another way: through active desktop components. An active desktop component is a piece of HTML or DHTML that you put on your desktop--a little window into the Web.

How are active desktop components helpful? Consider how you use Web information. Suppose you visit a Web site a few times a day because it contains rapidly changing stock information. In particular, you follow the price of a certain stock. Several times a day, you fire up the Web browser, find the site in the Favorites button, and open it. Not an onerous task, but one that takes time. With an active desktop component, you can have that stock's constantly changing price displayed on your desktop. The idea behind the active desktop component is that it saves you time and effort because you do not need to constantly open a favorite Web site. (Of course, as with all network applications, you must consider bandwidth performance implications.)

When I first received the IE 4 platform preview, I put a few active desktop components, including a weather map, on my desktop. A few days later, I got rid of them for two reasons. First, the active desktop components took up space on my desktop, which was already quite full. Second, the active desktop components were annoying. When I'm looking at my screen, I'm usually reading. I find reading difficult when marquees scroll by, icons spin, and thunderclouds waver on a weather map. So I went back to my no-icon, single-color screen. All that open space seemed to boost my productivity. Even firing up the browser and hitting the Favorites button didn't seem so burdensome.

More Browsing Fun
Microsoft added several new toolbars to make IE 4's browser easier to use. (You'll no doubt read about these toolbars elsewhere, so I'm keeping this section short.) The toolbars offer many new features, such as auto completion of universal resource locators (URLs) and commands based on previous completions. For example, suppose you recently visited http://www.microsoft.com and http://www.tti-usa.com. If you then type www.t, the browser will automatically complete the line to http://www.tti-usa.com.

One toolbar has icons for intelligent Favorites, History, and Search functions. When you click on one of those icons, the screen splits into two side-by-side vertical panels that show different information. For example, suppose that you click the search icon. A two-panel screen appears, with the left panel containing a prompt to search for a topic. You search on "elver" and get several dozen hits. The hits appear in the left panel. You decide to open one of those hits. The selected Web page then appears in the larger right panel, while the hits from the original search remain displayed in the left panel.

With IE 4, you can remove functions and commands from a toolbar and paste them anywhere. For example, you can put the URL address bar on the task bar and type URLs straight into the task bar. But the fun part comes in trying to make the browser work reliably.

Java Goes Warp Speed, but Seeks Assimilation
For those who haven't been following the programming language world, Java is an object-oriented (OO) language that captivated programmers for a while. What distinguishes Java from other OO languages is that it is a platform-independent development tool that, unfortunately, is slow--that is, until now.

When Microsoft Web programmers built IE 4, they used Java, the conventional Web language, but they achieved unconventional results. Microsoft's unconventionality brings both good and bad news. The good news is that IE 4's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) runs about half the speed of compiled code (such as C, COBOL, or FORTRAN), which is warp speed in the Java world. In fact, IE 4's JVM outperformed Netscape 4's JVM in a benchmark testing program that Microsoft conducted. Test results showed that IE 4's and Navigator's speeds were equal in the Sieve of Eratosthenes test, floating point operations, and graphics. However, IE 4 considerably outclocked Netscape in logic operations (nearly four times faster) and string manipulation (more than twice as fast). IE 4 was staggeringly faster in two other tests: the empty loop test (100 times faster) and a test to see how much time it takes for one program to call another (50 times faster). Microsoft broke Java's conventional speed barrier by making the engine faster with some better programming. In a language as young as Java, you can expect to see fairly impressive speed improvements in new implementations.

In addition to increasing Java's speed, Microsoft made Java platform-specific, which is the bad news. Microsoft made it possible for Java programmers to exploit the Win32 API in their programs, making Java a full-on Win32 development foundation.

Why did Microsoft make Java platform-specific? Microsoft says that Java was never truly platform independent because programmers had to debug every platform separately. With a platform-specific language, debugging will no longer be necessary. Microsoft believes that its programmers will become 30 percent to 200 percent more efficient as a result.

Aside from wanting to be more efficient, Microsoft's reasoning seems illogical to me. Java's strength was that it was platform independent. But rather than trying to remove the bugs to better accommodate different computer platforms, Microsoft is trying to force those platforms to assimilate its new proprietary language. Only time will tell whether resistance is futile.

Channels and Subscriptions
Because Web sites change frequently (usually daily or weekly), you often must wait while text, pictures, audio, video, or other content downloads. If this wait annoys you, you will probably like IE 4's subscription and channel features, which you see in Screen 2.

A subscription is an instruction to your browser that says something like, "Every day at 4:17 a.m., go to http://www.stardate.com and download the .wav file with today's stardate." When you surf to the stardate site later that morning, the content is already in your browser's cache. You don't need to wait to view the site.

To subscribe to a site, you just open it and tell IE 4 that you want to subscribe. But you probably don't want to download the entire site to your cache because of the size and the fact that only a few pages in most Web sites change regularly.

IE 4 has a way to control how much gets downloaded. In other words, you can control the depth of the site. Most sites open with a home page, which is the first level. The home page has links to other pages. Those pages are the second level. The second-level pages have links to other pages, which is the third level, and so on. You can tell IE 4 how many levels to go down in the subscription download.

This process is a bit crude because many Web sites tend to be more wide than deep. For example, pulling the first three levels from Microsoft's Web site would be quite a task. But you can also reduce the amount of information transferred by telling IE 4 not to pull down any combination of graphics, audio, and video.

You can further refine the subscription instructions using IE 4's channel feature. Suppose you want to subscribe to site X, but you want only pages A.htm, B.htm, and C.htm, which are scattered across the Web site's structure. You can create a channel that contains these pages. Once it is created, all you have to do is click on the channel to open those pages.

Channels consist of channel definition files. These CDFs are ASCII files that look like HTML files, except they have tags such as <channel>. CDFs let you create a single file containing references to unconnected groups of Web pages.

Channels are particularly useful when a Web site's administrator creates them. If a Web administrator creates a channel and you subscribe to it, your browser will get whatever pages the administrator placed in the CDF. If the administrator regularly modifies what's in the CDF, you'll get constantly changing content from a single channel with no effort on your part.

For example, I'll usually pay at least one visit each week to The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 at http://www.midwinter.com. (Babylon 5 is a science-fiction television show.) The show's story line is so complex that volunteers assemble 5 to 10 pages of analysis and commentary on each week's episode.

Ideally, I'd like to have each week's analysis sitting in my browser's cache every Saturday morning. I'd like to get it as a subscription, but I can't, at least not practically. I could subscribe to the entire level of pages that describe each episode, but I'd end up downloading dozens of pages that I've already seen. Instead, I want a magic button that automatically gets the page relevant to the last night's episode.

Although I can't create this magic button, the Web administrator for The Lurker's Guide could. The administrator simply needs to create a This Week channel and change the CDF on the server each week to point to that week's analysis page. Then all I need to do is subscribe to that channel to have one-click access to the latest news from the year 2260.

I'm not sure that Microsoft intended for channels to be used in this way, but a Web site could actually maintain a CDF that points to other Web sites. For example, suppose I have a herpetological bent, so I am the administrator of a Web site featuring different amphibians and reptiles. Although I want to add a Turtle Time channel, I don't want to create any of the content. All I need to do is surf the Web for sites with turtle content and update my CDF file every day with new sites. People can then subscribe to my site's channel (I'd charge them for my hard work, of course) to get up-to-date information on all types of turtles, from the saw-toothed slider to the fearsome alligator snapping turtle. If Turtle Time took off, I'd have the capital to launch a sister site, Lizard World.

Channels that point to other Web sites have practical applications. Many firms currently collect, photocopy, and distribute daily news digests culled from many media sources. Why not build a channel on a firm's intranet instead? Of course, if a firm takes this route, it needs to consider legal (i.e., copyright) implications.

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