Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 Developer Preview Developer Preview Still Buggy Nick Brown
The Developer Preview of Internet Explorer 5.0 is available for download. However, we must stress that this is a Developer Preview and should not be used on your primary computer unless you have complete knowledge of the software. This preview version still has many bugs and some Web pages do not load correctly.
The Developer Preview is intended to prepare Web professionals, programmers, and software authors for the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 5.0. It is currently available for download from the Microsoft Site Builder Network (SBN) Web site. Web developers and authors alike should find Internet Explorer 5.0 a welcome platform for building Web applications, due in part to a full-featured and increasingly stable development environment. Authors who create advanced Web applications employing Dynamic HTML (DHTML) will also enjoy improved support for key standards, namely the Document Object Model (DOM), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Extensible Markup Language (XML).
IE 5.0 Developer Preview is delivered as a set of interchangable components that are designed to make editing tasks a snap. One of IE 5.0's new features, called DHTML Behaviors, makes DHTML much easier to create.
Demonstrating a desire for early adoption, IE 5.0 features wide-ranging support for emerging HTML extensions and Web enabled script languages, arguably at the expense of stability. But if staying ahead of the all-important curve is on your agenda, IE 5.0 has a clear advantage, boasting more inclusion of hot-off-the-press technologies than any of its competitors. According to Microsoft, IE 5.0 is currently the only browser to support DHTML, DOM, CSS 2.0, PICS, XML, CDF, ActiveX, Java, and JavaScript or ECMAScript.
When compared to Internet Explorer 4.0, IE 5.0's main improvements are faster page rendering and data processing as well as better extensibility.
Who will take the title in the fight for the future of web browsing? Microsoft thinks it will, and its betting IE 5.0 will deliver Netscape a knock-out punch. Though until Netscape joins the 5.0 fray we can only wait and wonder--in the meantime the battle of the browsers continues unabated.
Check out Microsoft's official Internet Explorer 5.0 Web site here.
