4/103.3.6.2 Microsoft Internet Explorer
Microsoft's counterpart to Netscape Navigator is Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE). The latest release is version 3.0, available for Windows 3.11/95/NT and Macintosh. The UNIX version is announced to be released in the first quarter of 1997. Microsoft claims to be completely compatible with HTML 3.2, the specification of the W3 Consortium. In addition to Netscape Navigator, MSIE provides the following features:
- ActiveX to allow OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) objects (e.g., a WinWord document) to be inserted into WWW pages;
- A just-in-time compiler
![[*]](/Teaching/theses/1997/_idbde_/rpersche/images/foot_motif.gif)
for Java; this makes Java applets, which are normally
interpreted, much faster.
- Java class compression for faster downloading.
- VBScript, a subset of Visual Basic;
- Improved JavaScript compatibility;
- Integrated VRML support;
- Enhanced security with 128 bit encryption in the USA and Canada.
Also, this list does not claim to be complete. Nevertheless, these additional features make life hard for the WWW community. If you want to provide the perfect WWW page, you will have to make several versions for different browsers. Besides, as mentioned in Section 3.3.5, Netscape and Microsoft's interpretation of HTML is not identical, resulting in the same HTML file looking different on both browsers.
Like Netscape, Microsoft is announcing a new product, Internet Explorer 4.0, an open integrated suite of Internet software. Communication and integration are the main focuses both in Microsoft and Netscape's new product announcements. Integration means that browsers should not be separate programs but should be integrated into the desktop software. There is no doubt that Windows is the platform both companies are concentrating on, and often third party plug-ins are available only for Microsoft Windows.