The war of the 4.0 browsers may seem like a distant memory, but with the trickling out of new features in Netscape and Microsoft's new browsers, things may start spicing up for the battle-nostalgic.
Netscape (NSCP) recently unveiled its "smart" browser intentions, and now Microsoft (MSFT) has released an early developer preview of Internet Explorer version 5.0.
The company said the release is only intended to give developers a head start with the new features. To get it, developers need to complete the company's online registration form.
Under the theme of easier-to-build Web applications, Redmond is touting better manageability and an enhanced development platform via three categories of features: faster page rendering and data processing, enterprise-readiness, and extensibility and componentization features.
In the faster rendering and processing category, IE 5's support for "fixed" table layouts will render tables much faster, Microsoft says. That's because the browser can display the table without first calculating the minimum and maximum size of table cells. Table content will be displayed on the page while the rest of the table is still loading.
To take advantage of networks that use caching, a new header feature ensures that IE 5 will only circumvent a cache when a page has expired, as indicated by support for the "HTTP-Expires" header. Where caches are being used, this technique is designed to retrieve pages faster from nearby cache servers and reduce network traffic.
The browser is also capable of rendering very large documents faster, Microsoft said. A more efficient rendering engine promises better handling of pages built with Dynamic HTML or using "DataBinding" technology.
The new release is XML-capable as well, allowing XML code to be embedded in pages as data or meta-data. XML tags can also be coded within the page's HTML, Microsoft said, and cascading-style sheet properties can be applied to this content to control their appearance.
For third-party applications seeking to display Web content within their own interfaces, IE5 accommodates "browser-less" development. Thus developers can create any application -- a calculator or recipe collection, for example -- that renders HTML and other code but doesn't depend on browser software.
