Mac Internet Explorer 5.5: The Leaked Details

By AppleInsider Staff (AppleInsider@AppleInsider.com )



June 26, 2000

With the rest of the Macintosh Business Unit over at Microsoft indulged in the late development stages of Microsoft Office 2001, the members of the Macintosh Internet Explorer team have recently wrapped up the first beta of what the company is calling "Internet Explorer 5.5 Macintosh Edition Preview."



Compiled just prior to the team's departure for the MacHack conference, the beta/preview build is said to contain several new, low-profile features and many bug fixes. However, sources noted that the feature set of the current preview build is not necessarily reflective of the final build of the product and is subject to change.

Among its enhancements, sources said, Internet Explorer 5.5 supports type-select navigation. Type-select navigation allows users to navigate to links on a webpage the way they may navigate the Macintosh's Finder through using only the keyboard. When a user begins typing, the link -- which may be either a text or image link -- that most closely matches the typed characters is automatically selected and highlighted. In order to continue on to the highlighted link, users simply hit the enter or return key.



Sources said a handy new key-command will allow users to open links in new background windows while surfing the web. "Users can open new links in browser windows that are placed behind the currently loaded browser windows by holding down the command and shift keys while clicking the desired link."

In addition to the efficiency enhancements to the browser's interface, sources are reporting that the application's 'Tasman' rendering engine also sports a number of improvements to Cascaded Style Sheets 1 and 2, as well as HTML 4, JavaScript and XML. The development team has also been tweaking the rendering engine to increase performance, standards-compliance, and stability, sources inside the company said.



Internet Explorer 5.5 beta 1 also sports some visual interface and user experience advancement. A feature called "Extensible Toolbars" will allow users to drag images off a webpage and into the Internet Explorer button bar and create links to target URLs or execute a pre-designed or custom JavaScript.

This feature currently supports GIF, JPEG, Animated GIF and PNG image formats. With animated GIFS, the image continues to animate while in the button bar, while still images can have four states: enabled, disabled, rollover, or depressed. These images can be local or loaded over a network such as the Internet.



The current build is not carbon compliant, sources said, and that it is unknown when the company plans to unveil the product, formally.