Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0

Performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0

Unfortunately, we encountered some odd behavior in IE 6. These quirks aren't serious enough to render the browser a disappointment, but Microsoft should have done more usability testing. In the Tools menu, for example, there's an option called Show Related Links. Select it, and out pops an Explorer Bar (Microsoft's term for the panels that take up the left-hand side of the browser, like the Media Bar) that shows related search engine results from the Alexa search site. Alexa uses surfing patterns from a large pool of Web users to identify sites that may be related to one another. The problem? As you browse to other pages, the Related Links panel never changes and doesn't update with new related links until you click the Update button. On the other hand, Netscape's similar panel continuously updates according to the page you're visiting.

Even more annoying, IE's error messages can be confusing because they do not all behave the same way. Normally, when a Web page experiences a JavaScript or VBScript error, a script error window pops up. For every other similar warning pop-up in IE 6, you must select a check box if you don't want the pop-up to appear again, but in the script error pop-up, you select the check box if you do want it to appear again. We found this to be inconsistent, unintuitive, and annoying.

One last strange and potentially irritating trait: When it was first released, IE 6 didn't play nice with Netscape-style plug-ins, QuickTime in particular. Apple has since updated QuickTime to overcome this problem, and when we played several videos with QuickTime, we didn't experience any difficulties. We're not aware of any other plug-ins that may conflict with IE, but keep your eyes open for similar problems.

We were also a little underwhelmed by IE 6's performance in our speed tests. In one of our tests, IE 6 outperformed IE 5.5 and Netscape 6.1. And IE 6 consistently outperformed Netscape 6.1. However, IE 6 lagged behind its predecessor in almost every other test--not by much, but we'd expect better performance from a major upgrade.



Against Netscape 7, IE 6 turned in a mixed performance. In general, we found that IE 6 performed certain tasks faster than Netscape 7 but fell short in others. HTML page loads were nearly twice as fast on IE as they were using the Netscape browser. On the other hand, Netscape beat IE at loading XML, CSS, and PDF documents.