Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5 To Ship at Macworld

At Macworld Expo in January, Microsoft will release Internet Explorer 4.5 for the Macintosh, a major upgrade to the company’s Macintosh Web browser. Several features have stood out in our testing of pre-release versions, including AutoFill for automatically filling out basic contact information in Web forms, AutoComplete for completing text in forms, print preview, and the capability to shrink Web pages to fit when printing (it’s ideal for printing out directions from a Web mapping service). A feature that we’ve found interesting, though less successful, is Internet Explorer’s support for Sherlock: you can summarize a page to the clipboard and use Sherlock to find pages similar to the one you’re viewing. Other enhancements include a beefed-up Favorites Explorer bar, which now includes channels, a new Page Holder bar that you use to hold another page whose links you can then view in the main window, and a Go button for people who don’t realize you can type in the Address field and press Return. Finally, Internet Explorer 4.5 offers better performance, especially when returning to previously visited pages. Stability has been good even with the pre-release versions, so the combination of the new features and better performance should make Internet Explorer 4.5 a worthwhile upgrade.