News
MSIE5 Mac
Version 5 of the Internet Explorer finally made it to the Macintosh computer. Apparently they changed the default font-size to the Windows standard, which sounds like less trouble for web-designers, whether or not they specify font-sizes in their layout.
Opera 4
Opera 4 is in its final version. Again a quick download.
While the interface lacks a professional, streamlined look,
the CSS2 style sheet positioning has better support (and
still is seriously flawed). The page rendering is fast as ever.
The chosen MDI approach isn't too intuitive.
I suppose this browser is the best alternative to the
"big two" for visually impaired people, with it's zoom feature, and
optional overriding of HTML/ CSS formatting.
Opera 4 final shareware release for download at http://www.opera.com/download.html
Netscape
Netscape is coming closer to build a great CSS browser... the Mozilla
Seamonkey v5 (6) alpha version supports word-spacing, first-line and first-letter
pseudo elements... things lacking in IE to this day. It also caught up on other missing
stuff like letter-spacing. Borders and styles work fine now. Like dotted. Setting overflow
works... so you can make up individual blocks with scroll bars. Cursor styles work. Form
elements can contain styles now.
This site, which uses a relatively big stylesheet, shows off nearly as intended... there's
definitely less tweaking ahead then even the small transition between IE4 to 5 brought... and
this is just the Alpha-version!
More HTML4... there's inline frames.
Graphics... rescalable GIF animations... PNG support...
And of course, you get XML.
About DOM... couldn't get anything to work for now (like alerting id.nodeName)... but there's a working DOM animation example coming with the program... however it's making things so slow I had to restart the program. Other demos crashed this version right away...
The program interface is still very buggy...
The preview release download is incredibly slow!
Navigator 6 preview release for download at Netscape's http://home.netscape.com/download/previewrelease.html
Related software
New plug-ins, add-ons etc.
Windows Media Player 7 Technology Preview
Most notably with the ability to create skins, a nifty (and quite useless) feature
of customizing the layout.
The program is incredibly
buggy. Many things are hard to do, can't be done at all, or cause strange side effects.
The good stuff:
- Skins are written in XML and JS
- You can rip CD's
- Most of them are then correctly added to the Media Lib (artist, album name...) without you adding any information
- You can get additional info (like Discography, album cover) on certain CD's
The program looks very promising and definitely should be worth the update... once it's finished!
In-depth
MSIE5
About the Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5. Briefly covering DOM, VML, XML/ XSL, CSS and JScript. Featuring a DHTML sample of a MSIE5-only desktop-like internet page with popup-folders and pseudo-programs.