Last week's article on Internet Explorer spawned numerous discussions in TidBITS Talk that explored different aspects of the new release and the future of the Web browser market in general.
Many people wrote in with their experiences with Internet Explorer 5.0, expressing different opinions about the new look of the interface and commenting on the changes they liked or disliked. Although long, this discussion highlights aspects of Internet Explorer that we weren't able to cover in the review and garnered responses from Microsoft employees.
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Another hot topic, given the emphasis Microsoft placed on its Tasman rendering engine, were pages that Internet Explorer 5.0 failed to render properly. Some were quick to accuse Microsoft, but in at least several cases, it turned out that the pages suffered from mangled HTML. That discussion in turn encourage some members of TidBITS Talk to take a clean-up pass on their own pages, something we should all do on occasion.
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Finally, it became clear that although Internet Explorer 5.0 supports XML, it is not a complete XML 1.0 browser, which can lead to problems working with XML documents. Still, the fact that XML is supported at all is a step forward for many users.
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A number of other smaller discussions covered topics like text size issues, window management, Internet Explorer's approach to text clippings, and the current status of the Mozilla open source project. If you're interested in the world of Web browsers, take a look at these TidBITS Talk hot topics.