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Tech Support Friday:
All Things Browsers
Fast Forward's Rob Pegoraro
Friday, Sept. 7, 2001; 2 p.m. EDT
This week, Post columnist Rob Pegoraro discusses the new Internet Explorer 6.0 browser. What works and what doesn't? Read Pegoraro's article "Micro Advances In New Version Of Internet Explorer" (Post, Sept. 7, 2001).
Problems with your hard drive? Take your question to the Fast Forward instead! It's a repeat engagement of "Tech Support Friday," in which Rob Pegoraro takes your queries, scrambles madly to get answers to them from the collective Fast Forward brain trust and replies within mere minutes.
Below is the transcript.
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Rob Pegoraro: Greetings and salutations... in my column today, I review Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6, the company's latest Web browser. Today's Fast Forward section also has a review of Netscape 6.1, so this makes it a fine day to talk about Web browsers. What you like about them, what you don't like, what you'd like to do but don't know how. And so on...
Internet Browsing:
Hello
This isn't really a question about the IE 6.0 but something about Internet browsing in general. I work at an an office that is networked. Quite a few of my colleagues spend a lot of time on the Internet browsing pages that are not necessarily related to work. My question is - even if they delete the history file, can the tech center or administrator of the computer network keep tabs of the web pages that all the employees visit? Is Internet browsing something that can be monitored outside of the individual desktop pc itself?
Thanks
Rob Pegoraro: Sure thing, especially if your office (like most) uses a firewall to secure its computers. That means each computer has to send its data through a gateway machine, at which point all of your Internet activity is easily logged.
Upper Marlboro, Md.:
Rob,
I would like to know what you think of the "Computer Market Pro Show", the event that's being advertized on tv at the PG Learning Center. Are these legitimate events in that you get quality products or is it really a pot luck situation? I'm thinking illegal software and other illregularities but I don't know for sure.
Rob Pegoraro: I've never been to one, but--years ago--we had a writer check these shows out. Most of the merchandise appeared to be legit, but there were some sketchy offerings as well. The bottom line seemed to be that people need to go into the show with a limited shopping list and a fair amount of technical knowledge--it was easy to leave with The Wrong Thing. I suspect this holds true today.
Bethesda, Md.:
Is the browser W3C compatible?
Rob Pegoraro: W3C is short for the World Wide Web Standards Consortium (www.w3.org). It is not fully compliant with all the specs (it flunked a layout-rendering test called the "box acid test")... but most pages look fine in it anyway. Most Web developers write pages that will look fine in IE, simply because it's what almost everybody is using. So, de facto, IE 6 is standards-compliant--because most people see it as the standard.
Rockville, Md.:
I'm a fairly sophisticated computer user. When I saw the promo to download IE6, I jumped on it. It took three tries to get the installation to complete (kept hanging on the Media Player). Then, when I launched IE6, I got a "scan" error message which hung my PC which I determined was McAfee Virus. So I tried to run a Virus Scan and got an app error. Obviously the IE install corrupted the Virus Scan. I tried repairing Virus Scan. No luck. I had to completely uninstall it, then reinstall. Now everything works fine. Had I read your review, I wouldn't have bothered with the upgrade.
Rob Pegoraro: Sorry to hear things went so badly. There is a rich tradition of IE installs bombing out PCs... IE 4 was a real disaster in this respect, and IE 5.5 killed my reviewer's modem through some mysterious process that nobody every understood.
FWIW, I had no glitches on the two machines I put it on (one a Win 2000 desktop, another an aging Win 98 SE laptop).
Browser war:
Which browser is better?
New Netscape or Internet Explorer 6.0?
Rob Pegoraro: I would give the nod to IE 6. I'm not totally happy about this... but Netscape still runs noticeably slower, at least on my everyday machine. I also really resent Netscape's habit of plastering AOL advertising *all over* the desktop.
I'm more interested to see what Mozilla will look like (check out the next question)...
wiredog:
I find that the latest Mozilla is good enough for me. A'course, I run Linux.
btw, what's this "blue screen" people keep talking about? Some sort of value-add that MS puts in Windows?
Rob Pegoraro: Mozilla, which I just referred to, is the open-source version of Netscape--essentially, most of the features and none of the AOL marketechture. The problem with it is that it's suck in the world longest development cycle--the 1.0 release date just slipped from this October to sometime early next year.
Market Pro computer shows: Philly, Pa.:
I go to the ones here in PA on a regular basis and I agree: if you don't know exactly what you're looking for; have no clue about computers, and don't have patience to look for good prices, then you'll get burned.
Best to do your research beforehand. Walk around and look for the best prices.
Also, keep in mind that the components at the show aren't exactly top-of-the-line stuff. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
Rob Pegoraro: A first-hand report from the world of computer show-n-sales... thanks.
Falls Church, Va.:
I have been trying to get a Lucent Win Modem (made by Viking Components) to work in an Athlon 900 MHz based PC running Windows 98SE. No problems with the hardware and the driver installation. However when I tried to dial out, either through Hyperterm or a dial-up software that works fine on a another PC, the computer froze after what appeared to be the tone response of the remote site. Only power-on/off could unfreeze the PC. Modem diagnostics from Control Panel/MOdems/Properties/Diagnostics seems to be OK.
Rob Pegoraro: Lots of people hate Winmodems (modems that borrow the computer's main processor to do the compression/decompression work in software, instead of using their own hardware) because of situations like this. The modem is probably going to be easier to return than the computer--I'd get another brand or maybe ask for a replacement. The Athlon processor shouldn't make a difference, and 98 SE ought to be able to handle it fine too.
Washington, D.C.:
Sure would like to know the answer to this. No one else has been able to help. If I have multiple instances of a browser open, is there a way I can keep on top the one on which I'm currently working? In other words, how do I keep another one from popping up and taking over when it finishes loading, etc.?
Rob Pegoraro: You really can't. Browsers just don't seem to be built with the user's needs in mind. I actually just got an e-mail from (I believe) a programmer at Microsoft, who was apologetic about the lack of a way to control pop-up windows. He noted that these pop-ups are all done with JavaScript, which is, regrettably, part of the established set of Web standards now.
wiredog:
Remember that in the open source version numbering system version 0.9x is roughly equivalent to the Microsoft 4.x. You see, the names of the coders are prominent in Moz, and they don't want to get flames for bad, or even annoying, things. So they don't release until they are really, really, REALLY ready. Moz 0.93 is perfectly useable and hasn't crashed on me yet. Certainly more stable than Konqueror. And prettier than Opera.
Rob Pegoraro: True enough--but it also looks bad to those not in the open-source world. I'm not sure that the Mozilla folks are necessarily looking for success there. But I also don't think Netscape is providing enough effective competition.
I haven't tried the recent Mozilla builds, FWIW, but the earlier ones I've used did seem at least as usable as the then-finished version of Netscape.
Virginia:
When I read an article in the Post online, I cannot use the control find command to search for a word.
Rob Pegoraro: This response may drive you up the wall... but it works fine on this computer. (Sorry :) What browser are you using?
Rob Pegoraro: BTW, I do have one thing to correct in today's review of IE 6. You can, in fact, change the default search (that is, the one that runs when you type a search phrase in the toolbar). It's merely entombed inside IE's interface.
Here's how to change that:
1) Click on the Search toolbar icon.
2) Click the "Customize" button at the top right corner of that frame (the word "customize" may be cut off by the frame).
3) Click on the "Autosearch settings" button at the bottom left of the window that opens.
4) Select a search engine from the drop-down list there. You still can't select Google, but if you choose Yahoo, your searches will get piped through Google in some cases, IIRC.
Now if this option were actually, in oh, say, perhaps the INTERNET OPTIONS dialog box, maybe I would have found it sometime before today. Hmph.
Reston, Va. 20191:
Hello Rob. Interesting column - I've been using Opera (the free version) for some months now -- it is indeed fast by the way -- any reason I'd want to bother to update IE 5.50 (one of the two standby browsers) to IE 6? How about bothering to upgrade Netscape 4-something to 6, given that I only use that for the occasional secure session? Really, I suppose the question is, given I have Opera, why bother with either of the others?
Rob Pegoraro: Excellent question. In your case, the only reason to use or upgrade to a different browser is if some Web site locks out somebody not using specific versions of IE or Netscape. This does happen, but usually only at some financial institutions' sites, where they will only let in browsers whose security mechanisms have been certified by the bank.
Arlington, Va.:
Rob, where can I go online to check out the latest browsers? I didn't know there were more than 2 out there.
Rob Pegoraro: There's a few different sites out there. BrowserWatch (http://www.browserwatch.com) is horrifyingly geeky, but worth checking out. Download.com is another decent resource.
Sterling, Va.:
In IE 5.4, is there a way to put a "Find" button on the toolbar? I hate to do CTRL+F all the time.
Why doesn't IE let you put a find button there? Or am I clueless?? Thanks.
Rob Pegoraro: You can customize the toolbar icons (right-click on the toolbar and select "customize") but a "find" button doesn't seem to be among the ones you can add or remove to the toolbar. Sorry.
Washington, D.C. :
My Web browser is AOL and I haven't been able to open a special readme document on my Epson printer installation CD that it says must be opened on a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape. I don't want to subscribe to either of those two just to open one document but it doesn't open on AOL.
Rob Pegoraro: I'm surprised that AOL's own browser--which is just a repackaged version of an older IE release--can't open it. But if you've tried that and it doesn't work, yeah, download a copy of IE or Netscape. You don't need to "subscribe" to anything or pay anybody, nor do you need to change this browser to your default. It's just a piece of software that you can (in the case of Netscape) uninstall when you're done with it.
College Park, Md.:
How is Netscape 6.1 different from mozilla 9.2.1? I tried mozilla 9.2 and I liked it's feel.
Also, I recently started using konqueror, associated with KDE. I use it for most browsing now, it's nice and lean, & fairly stable.
http://www.mozilla.org/
http://www.konqueror.org/
Thanks!
Rob Pegoraro: Haven't compared the two. Wiredog, any comments for College Park?
Bethesda, Md.:
Hi, I have a problem that none of our techies seems to be able to fix. Since upgrading to Win2000, IE routinely freezes and I am unable to close IE--an End message appears, then when I click end now, a debugger message appears. this process is repeated several times.
Yesterday, I upgraded to IE6, but the problem, although slowing in frequency, appeared earlier today. What gives?
Rob Pegoraro: The beauty of Microsoft integrating the browser into the operating system is that problems such as yours become infinitely harder to resolve! Is your Win 2000 install up to date, with all the service patches? Have you done the usual debugging rituals--trashing the cache and deleting the history files? Do you have any weird plug-ins installed?
Tina in Falls Church, Va.:
Wanted to pass on a GOOD experience with Logitech. Bought a mouseman wheel a year ago and on the holiday the scroll wheel stopped working. Went through the usuals: uninstall, reinstall, download newest version and no change. Since I have an unlimited minutes long distance provider (www.bluekiwi.com) I called the Nevada tech support. Wonderful help, thorough diagnostics with much hand holding. They were very appologetic that I had this problem and are sending a new mouse and transmitter. They made a customer for life!
Rob Pegoraro: A happy tech-support story--quite a rarity in this business. Thanks for sending it along.
Alexandria, Va.:
I've been a user of Netscape since the early days, and before that, of Gopher, Mosaic etc. (yeah, I'm dating myself). So nowadays, if we like neither NOTscape's AOLian marketing schtick, or IE's propensity to cause all sorts of havoc during installs (not to mention the fact that it's a MS product born of their megalomaniacal tendencies), what alternatives do we have besides the two?
Rob Pegoraro: I'd point you towards Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) or Opera (http://www.operasoftware.com). The latter is particularly impressive--very small and fast. You do have to put with either some ads in the interface or pay a small licensing fees, but lots of people do like it.
Arlington, Va.:
As usual, no innovation from MS, now that they have no competitor to copy. NS6.1 and
Mozilla are really making innovative advances. When will IE support AIM like NS6.1
already does ? Will IE ever be HTTP compliant
or will they continue to ignore standards ?
Rob Pegoraro: IE will never support AOL Instant Messenger, at least not until AOL opens its own messaging system. The company says it's making that happen, but we'll see... it's got a nice proprietary lock-in there and seems reallllly reluctant to surrender that. I see this as a case where AOL and Microsoft are equal-opportunity offenders in one way or another.
Sterling, Va.:
Hi. I recently left a company and retained the computer I was using. There were two domains I used, the one at work (corporate domain), "Domain A" and the local Domain "Domain B" (which I rarely used)
Now I can only log into "Domain B" as Administrator. I cannot log into "Domain A" at all, even as a registered user.
If I have MS Outlook archived in "Domain A" (corporate domain), how can I view the data? Is there a way to crack into "Domain A"? I've tried looking in the Profiles folder when in "Domain B", but the Outlook archive files aren't around.
Please help!
Rob Pegoraro: Are you still on speaking terms with your old company? I'd ask the sysadmin there if he has any idea what's going on.
Otherwise, it's time to start hacking into the computer. This kinda goes beyond my expertise... actually, it's totally beyond my expertise :) I suppose, at an extreme, you could take the hard drive out of the computer, plug it into another machine, and read it there. (I'm assuming there's no encryption of the data here.)
Any suggestions?
wiredog:
To College Park: Moz 0.93 is more far stable than Konq, at least on my SuSe 7.1 distro. It doesn't have the ads that Opera and Netscrape have. The main advantage to konq is that you can turn off pop-ups (and unders, darn X-10) easily. Moz can do that too, supposedly, but I haven't figured out how yet.
Rob Pegoraro: FYI, for College Park...
Somewhere, USA:
How do you keep cookies from being installed in your browser. Do any of the browsers give you an alert message?
Rob Pegoraro: All the browsers out there now, IIRC, will let you block all cookies from being sent. They'll also give you the option of approving or rejecting each cookie presented to your computer.
I do *not* recommend this at all! You will either find that many sites don't work at all, or you'll be presented with an endless succession of pop-up alerts asking if this cookie and that are OK.
Most cookies are fine! It's just a handful of sites that misuse them to collect advertising and marketing data, but don't give users any say about it. Those are the ones that you need to watch out for.
Washington, DC:
The problem with Opera is it's weak implimentatuion of Javascript. It fails out on a lot more than financial sites, any site that's script heavy will likely break in Opera.
Rob Pegoraro: More comments on Opera. This is an important point... JavaScript--a way to set up simple Web interactivity without doing more complex stuff like embedding Java programs in a Web site--is one of those standards that's too often not quite a standard.
Rob Pegoraro: Other tidbits from my e-mailbag this morning:
* Somebody else from Microsoft noted something called the Profile Assistant, which can store your personal contact info (like AutoFill on the Mac) and pass it on to sites on request. I've known about this for a while and have some of my contact info in this thing, but I have never actually seen anyplace use this feature--while AutoFill works with pretty much any Web site form.
* A couple of people wrote in to recommend the Google toolbar as a way to quickly use that search engine.
Washington, D.C.:
For Macintosh users out there, there is yet another browser, iCab. It, like Opera, is lean and fast. In addition, its JavaScript implementation allows you (unlike IE6 or the Netscape offerings) to selectively filter JavaScript actions such as opening new windows (for pop-up ads) or resizing your current browser window.
Check here: http://www.icab.de
There are versions for both the Classic Mac OS and OSX. The downside is that, at least under OS X, some pages just cause things to shut down, but the vast majority of pages work just fine.
Rob Pegoraro: Oh yeah! iCab's another neat alternative browser. I took a look at it (and an earlier version of Opera) in a column I did way back when Netscape 6 first arrived in beta form. Like Opera, it's incredibly compact to download and run. It's a good choice for an older Mac.
Washington, D.C.:
Cookies. I suggest downloading a bit of Software called Ad-aware. It's free, and it strips your system of tracking cookies and those nasty embedded downloads lots of freeware comes with now. For example, Bearshare loads 3 advertising software items along with the main program. Ad-aware scans for all of these, and gives you a listing of items you can choose to delete.
It's scary to run it the first time and see exactly how much junk has been surrepticiously loaded onto your system.
Rob Pegoraro: Good advice--but AdAware polices your PC for programs surreptitiously installed by other applications, which are entirely different from cookies. Cookies aren't executable programs; they're just little bits of text.
Anyway. We reviewed AdAware a few months ago, and our reviewer found it as useful and enlihtening as you do.
Olney, Md.:
Hi, Rob. I've reluctantly moved from NN to IE as Navigator has become more cumbersome and less useful. Don't feel reluctant about giving IE the edge -- I bet a good number of those following this don't remember the olden days when NN was the underdog instead of another Goliath.
I wanted to ask if anyone else out there is having problems with Opera following certain links (yes, I allowed automatic redirecting...eventually) or printing or specifically, clicking on some buttons in web forms. All the Opera "support" people were able to offer was that it worked for them, and maybe I should identify the browser as IE (I was) or enable referrer logging (I did, no help).
Oh, and for those tired of pop-ups, I've been discussing that very topic with some friends, and if you search for Pop-up Stopper or Ad Zapper you will find two applets that do just that.
Rob Pegoraro: Since we seem to have some knowledgeable Opera users around today, I'll see if they can answer your question.
Washington, D.C.:
Rob, Ad-Aware does both. It also scans your cookies file for Doubleclick items and other tracking cookies.
Heh, I'm a web programmer, I know what cookies are! (smirks)
Rob Pegoraro: Thanks for the clarification. And stay off of my computer! :)
Olney, Md.:
Rob, it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing with cookies! I've been using Guidescope, a little proxy server, and telling it to allow cookies only to and from sites that I decide to allow that priveledge. The rest get CRUNCHED! It can block banner ads, too.
Rob Pegoraro: IE 6 does let you do this as well... but the problem with the selective, site-by-site approach is that most users have no idea if a particular domain is good or bad. The privacy settings in the program are a better long-term approach. I'd adjust them from "medium" to "medium-high" for a start--that should block out more of the third-party ad-network cookies.
Rockville, Md.:
Rob we're building a new 3D browser interface that will display multiple 2D Web pages in the same scene along with many other nice new features. The product is built on the IE 5.5+ engine and will be introduced at Comdex this November. What's the best way to have you review our new product?
Rob Pegoraro: Send us an e-mail *when it's about to ship* and give us a URL where we can find out more. Bear in mind that if a product is aimed exclusively or mostly at a corporate user base, or only runs on brand-new machines, we're not so likely to review it.
Closing Browsers:
What is the command to close all browser windows?
Rob Pegoraro: I must be forgetting something completely obvious... but I don't know! IE treats each open window as a seperate instance of itself, so you can't just exit the program from one window. I can't find any keyboard shortcuts to do this either.
Rob Pegoraro: On that note, I think we'll call it a day here. Thanks for all the questions! E-mail me if I missed any of yours. I'll be back here--not in three weeks, not in two weeks, but next week--to talk about Windows XP, Microsoft's [insert string of adjectives here] new operating system.
(If you'd like to share any insights/tips on it from trying out the final version or the preview releases, you know where to reach me)
Thanks!
- Rob
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