Microsoft Internet Explorer v4.0 for the Mac -- Not Ready for Prime Time?

I extensively used IE4 and Outlook Express, its emailer companion, for the past five days. I also received many reports from readers, both pro and con but mostly con.

Overall, I like both very much, especially Outlook Express, but too many errors cropped up for me to have enough faith to use either as my primary browser or emailer.

If you are going to use IE4, you should rid your computer of every vestige of IE3.01. Doing that and installing IE4 with extensions off substantially reduced my frequency of Type 3 errors. I still occasionally get one or a Type 10 error but at an uncomfortably greater frequency than with Netscape Communicator 4.0.4 (NC4), usually a Type 1. Sometimes IE4 seems slower than NC4 and sometimes faster but IE4 is a veritable speed demon when loading cached pages. Hitting the forward or backward arrows on IE4 produced instant pages--marvelous. The interfaces of IE4 and NC4 are similar but IE4 seems livelier and brighter--I like it. I also like the ability to place buttons to frequently-visited web sites on the header. This is very convenient.

I think Outlook Express (OE) is terrific but it is at least one version away from being my primary emailer. It is very much like Claris Em@iler, probably since it was designed by former Claris engineers, and is far better than Eudora Light, the other major freeware emailer. It is very easy to set up numerous email accounts in OE and very easy to switch among them, its best feature. One can nearly simultaneously retrieve email from all accounts--just one menu selection does it. I have only two gripes, one is fatal for now. First, one has to select in Preferences whether email will be sent immediately or archived until sent later--you get one or the other for all email. I like NC4 Messenger's ability to select that option on the fly for each email. My biggest problem with OE is that within two restarts after installation it constantly gives me the error message that it can't open the Preferences File -- this is very scary. If I just launch OE alone, even though I get the error message after the second or third launch, it seems to have accessed the Preferences File because all my settings, including accounts, are there and work. However, if I click the mailbox icon on IE4's header to launch OE, the settings are not there some of the time. I have been unable to rid my setup of this error message nor figure out why the settings are there some of the time and seemingly gone some of the time. They're really not gone, just inaccessible. This happens even though I've tried (though it is difficult) to find every IE4 and OE file and delete them before doing a reinstall.