Editorials

Five Things You'll see In IE 6... That Aren't New

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Microsoft is a company known for "monkey see, monkey do" behavoir. First is was the GUI, then it was the little things like the recylcling bin. Now it's things like Windows XP's GUI which is suprisingly similar to OS X. I'm going to predict 5 things you'll see in IE 6 for the Mac that are already done in competing browsers. Further more, I'm predicting that these features will be touted as original, and as major innovations straight from Redmond. Let's get started.

1) Tabbed browsing windows - This one is almost too obvious to use in this article. If you've used Mozilla lately, you'll notice that it's got tabs. What do I mean? Well, one browser window with multiple web pages. Here's a screen shot of my Chimera setup(click to enlarge):

It's the main reason why I love to use browsers based on Mozilla. Chimera has book marks that load tabs... I have one for Mac news that loads all my favorite Mac sites all at once. It's genius. Adam Iser has been using this same tab concept with Adium, a great AIM client. It was why I switched, and is currently why I don't use iChat. I'm just an all around sucker for tabs.

2) favicon.ico support - Windows users have long had icons they see in the link bar when they go to webpages. Webmasters load a specially named icon (favicon.ico) onto the root level of the server, and it gets shown on almost every browser except IE on the Mac. Look for this to change with 6.0. You can see our icon and some others in the above screen shots.

3) Pop-up Blocking - It's too good to pass up. Mozilla ships with it... and I see no pop-ups. It's great. Look for it to be touted as a fresh idea. Also look for MS pop-ups to still work (from MSN and such). This will probably be stuck under the preferences somewhere.

4) MetaData - I bet IE 6 will act more like Mozilla with MetaData. If you aren't in the know, it's info about the page that can be handy to the visitor. Stuff like RSS feeds, publish dates, author name, simple navigation and a ton more can be done in a special toolbar that pops up. It's nifty stuff that you have to scour the source for in IE.

5) Search in browser - I love searching Google right from Mozilla (in the link bar)... This will show up in IE 6, except it will be defaulted to MSN and be hell to switch to Google. There will be a way, and that's all that matters.

I'd love to see nerdy stuff like what images were loaded from where, which forms go to what pages, and allow javascript to do only certain things, but I have a feeling for that I'll have to stick with Mozilla. The good news is that the most popular Mac browser will be better. If you can't wait, most of the new functionality can already be harnessed. Mozilla for OS X isn't bad, but it feels bad because of its cross platform interface. For now, I'll stick with Chimera and it's Cocoa widgets :). If you have any comments or questions let me know.