Microsoft posted updates the Internet Explorer for Mac. Two separate downloads are available from Microsoft’s Web site, one for the Classic Mac OS and one specifically for Mac OS X. IE 5.2.1 provides all the latest security and performance enhancements for IE 5 for Mac OS X, according to information posted on Microsoft’s Web site. IE 5.1.5 for Mac OS 8.1 to 9.x provides enhanced support for HTTP and resolves all security vulnerabilities in previous versions of IE 5.Our Take: The new version is able to parse this page, while the previous versions could not (it was either truncating the page, or when you were paging down, it would only page down 2-3 pages and then you had to wait for 5-6 seconds for IE to find the next 2-3 pages and load them to memory!). However, speed-wise, IE is the slowest of all the browsers on that specific situation. It took the G4 450 Mhz Cube about 4 minutes to render this page (the download speed was not the limited factor as it takes my cable’s modem about ~20 secs to download that page) while the Carbon AA was off to help the overall rendering speed. At the time of rendering, CPU was on 100%, and the IE application was locked in general (not just the page that was rendering).
Out of curiosity I did the exact same test with the other Mac browsers. OmniWeb 4.1 is equally as slow as IE, having very similar problems, while iCab was pretty fast and was able to download and render the page without a hitch, however, everytime you were placing the scrollbar near the end of the document, it was keep bouncing back to the top! I had to do many page downs to witness that indeed iCab had successfully completed the loading and rendering of that page, but it only had that small bug in the scrollbar.
Opera 5 and Mozilla 1.0 were the only two browsers on Mac that were able to download and render the page extremely fast and without any other problems.
The Mozilla-based Chimera 0.3 browser is much slower than Mozilla 1.0 on the 450 Mhz G4, possibly because they have now remove the option to turn off the AA, which even with the Carbon “native” AA, it is still much slower than without AA.
