Changing browsing ways of the world

BANGALORE: I'd like to have had one most compelling software upgrades for 2003, but have had to split my praise between Opera 7.5 and MyIE2 9.12. These joint winners are redefining how application software can merge different technologies to make for a wholly different browsing experience.

I began testing the Opera 7.50 Beta Preview 1 (Build 3494) just hours after it was released last week to the Web. Now having used it for nearly a calendar week (as of writing), the improvements continue to amaze me. Of course there remain several gray areas, notably the M2 mail, news (and now chat) client that despite, whatever cosmetic improvements were made, still has a very long way to go.

On a usability scale of 5, I rate M2 below 3; making it functional but with an incredibly difficult learning curve. It's closer in layout and structure to Eudora than either Thunderbird -- the Mozilla project's mail & news component now available in a standalone version -- or the now quite ubiquitous (on account of Windows XP) Outlook Express.

But what I miss the most with M2 is the complete absence of Message Rules coupled with a singularly unintuitive interface. It may be just me, but I'll trade speed and simplicity over colorful views. True, M2 can display mail as encoded HTML or force to a plain text format. But there are too many buttons; most of which lack tool tips to let me know what they mean.

M2 puts everything into a single Inbox, mixing up multiple IMAP and POP3. True, you get a single unified Inbox but what I still fail to understand is the automatic (there's no other term of it) tagging of incoming messages as Spam. After I managed to successfully download mail from my test POP3 and IMAP accounts, the 4 messages were available in both the Received and the Spam mail folders! The Trash folder indicated 47 read messages, but actually contained nothing! Yet I was able to "delete" these missing messages.

M2 also is quite dependant on available network bandwidth, as messages downloaded on DSL with no errors when compared to multiple failures when receiving or sending using a slower dial-up connection. And it's IRC component is quite irritating. Unless you know the name of the room to join, the client won't display available channels. Although it did work after several hiccups with the 2 Opera demo servers: irc.opera.com and irc.se.opera.com. But once I joined the chat everyone else in the rooms (between 7-15 users) appeared dormant!

Initially, I experienced several system lockups that needed a cold system reboot. I remembered an old problem with the Automatic Memory Cache, and decided to disable this feature. The result was miraculous: a revisit to one specific URL and Opera didn't even stumble! My final test was of Opera's ability to spoof IE6 and work with Microsoft-technologies, best demonstrated by using the Hotmail site without experiencing any problems. Opera 7.5 is a great browser upgrade that you need to http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/o750tp1_3494.exe"

target="_downld">download and install yourself.

The second outstanding browser is http://www.myie2.com/"

target="_freel">MyIE2 9.12 released on Christmas Day. That offers a web surfer a browser engine choice between Internet Explorer (default) and the open-source Gecko engine that powers Mozilla (as also Firebird and the Camino browser for Mac). Of course you can only use one engine at a time.

And their behavior is quite different. But I'm getting ahead of myself. You need to first http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/MozillaControl16t1.exe"

target="_downld">download and install a separate ActiveX control (5 MB, free) that contains the actual engine from http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm"

target="_freel">http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm.

With the Gecko engine enabled, you may experience intermittent Flash, Shockwave and Java issues. To resolve these you'll need to install version specific plug-ins. However, getting the Java VM to work in Mozilla is difficult and it failed outright with MyIE2's Gecko engine. Right now MyIE2's status bar doesn't display which engine is selected. You still need to check that manually (File > New Page > Use Gecko Engine).

The browser history too doesn't work properly. Sometimes sites open at previous shutdown failed to load with the Gecko engine. Things went downhill when I found that sites opened using the Gecko engine aren't available with the IE browser history, and vice versa. And often when using the Gecko engine I found mouse movement becoming jerky and unresponsive; classic indicators of Mozilla instability.

Then for some reason my mouse's scroll feature vanished in MyIE2 regardless of browser engine. Having not experienced this problem before, all I can conclude is that its a bug. Super Drag 'n Drop too works rather spasmodically. I never can tell until I try and drag a hyperlink if it will actually open in a new window or give an error. Or when searching the Web for highlighted text. All this despite the vast knowledge pool fuelled by my experience and official online resources.

And finally, the Search Engine toolbar wars are beginning again. Hard on Yahoo's Search Companion toolbar for IE and the Google Search bar comes MSN's effort. The http://toolbar.msn-int.com" target="_blank">MSN Toolbar (current under testing) let you search the web, mark searched for terms in a web page using the highlighter, direct links opening quick links to launch MSN Hotmail, MSN Messenger and My MSN, and PopGuard: MSN

Explorer's popup window blocker (that will also be include in IE 6.05; a part of the forthcoming Windows XP SP-2).

That's it for 2003 Seasons Greeting and a Happy New Year 2004.