Apr 27 2009
Five Things You’ll see In IE 6… That Aren’t New
Microsoft is a company known for “monkey see, monkey do” behavoir.
First is was the GUI, then it was the little things like the recylcling bin.
Now it’s things like Windows XP’s GUI which is suprisingly similar to OS X.
I’m going to predict 5 things you’ll see in IE 6 for the Mac that are already
done in competing browsers. Further more, I’m predicting that these features
will be touted as original, and as major innovations straight from Redmond.
Let’s get started.
1) Tabbed browsing windows – This one is almost too obvious
to use in this article. If you’ve used Mozilla lately, you’ll notice that it’s
got tabs. What do I mean? Well, one browser window with multiple web pages.
Here’s a screen shot of my Chimera setup(click to enlarge):
It’s the main reason why I love to use browsers based on Mozilla.
Chimera has book marks that load tabs… I have one for Mac news that loads
all my favorite Mac sites all at once. It’s genius. Adam Iser has been using
this same tab concept with Adium,
a great AIM client. It was why I switched, and is currently why I don’t use
iChat. I’m just an all around sucker for tabs.
2) favicon.ico support – Windows users have long had icons
they see in the link bar when they go to webpages. Webmasters load a specially
named icon (favicon.ico) onto the root level of the server, and it gets shown
on almost every browser except IE on the Mac. Look for this to change with 6.0.
You can see our icon and some others in the above screen shots.
3) Pop-up Blocking - It’s too good to pass up. Mozilla ships
with it… and I see no pop-ups. It’s great. Look for it to be touted as a fresh
idea. Also look for MS pop-ups to still work (from MSN and such). This will
probably be stuck under the preferences somewhere.
4) MetaData – I bet IE 6 will act more like Mozilla with MetaData.
If you aren’t in the know, it’s info about the page that can be handy to the
visitor. Stuff like RSS feeds, publish dates, author name, simple navigation
and a ton more can be done in a special toolbar that pops up. It’s nifty stuff
that you have to scour the source for in IE.
5) Search in browser – I love searching Google right from Mozilla
(in the link bar)… This will show up in IE 6, except it will be defaulted
to MSN and be hell to switch to Google. There will be a way, and that’s all
that matters.
I’d love to see nerdy stuff like what images were loaded from where, which
forms go to what pages, and allow javascript to do only certain things, but
I have a feeling for that I’ll have to stick with Mozilla. The good news is
that the most popular Mac browser will be better. If you can’t wait, most of
the new functionality can already be harnessed. Mozilla for OS X isn’t bad,
but it feels bad because of its cross platform interface. For now, I’ll stick
with Chimera
and it’s Cocoa widgets 
. If you have any comments or questions let
me know.
After watching the Vista aftermath from the sidelines and hearing Windows users curse Microsoft for their pain, I find it interesting to hear the complaints from Mac users after installing Leopard.