Preliminary Reviewer's Guide

Microsoft® Internet Explorer 2.0 for Windows® 95 is the next generation of Microsoft's easy-to-use Internet browser designed for Windows 95. Internet Explorer is the easiest Internet browser to set up and use with the Windows 95 operating system, supports all major World Wide Web standards, and provides a firm foundation for future Internet innovations.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 embraces existing HTML standards, such as tables, while advancing HTML with new improvements such as inline video, background sounds, and marquee effects. Internet Explorer 2.0 delivers SSL support and support for Internet shopping applications. Also, Internet Explorer delivers increased performance with extensions to the HTTP protocol that maintain open channels between the server and the client.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 ships as part of the Internet Jumpstart Kit, a set of useful utilities and extensions to Windows 95 to make it convenient and easy for customers to configure Windows 95 for Internet access. The Internet Jumpstart Kit is available for download on MSN™ - The Microsoft Network, ftp.microsoft.com, and other online services, as well as being part of Microsoft Plus! and available on new PCs that have Windows 95 installed.

The Internet Jumpstart Kit consists of:

• Internet Setup Wizard - A tool that makes it easy to configure Windows 95 to surf the Internet by using The Microsoft Network or another Internet service provider
• Internet Explorer - Microsoft's Internet browser for Windows 95
• Internet Extensions - Extensions to Windows 95 to enhance the integration between Windows 95 and the Internet
• SMTP Mail Driver - A driver to allow the Microsoft Exchange Inbox to send and receive mail by using an SMTP/POP3 post office

Tables. Internet Explorer now supports tables. You can check these out by loading the table demonstration from the Microsoft Web site. Microsoft Internet Explorer extends table support to include alignment attributes that allow text to be flowed around the table.

Security. Microsoft Internet Explorer now supports SSL security, with an upgraded random-number generator. In addition, Internet Explorer will support STT (Secure Transaction Technology—jointly developed by Microsoft and VISA International) for financial transactions, and PCT (Private Communication Technology)—a new secure channel protocol developed by Microsoft and industry partners.

NNTP News. Customers can read Usenet newsgroups by using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Sound and video. Microsoft Internet Explorer incorporates HTML extensions that let background sounds and inline video be used on Web pages. These new media types enrich the user's experience of the Web and enable content providers to create more compelling pages.

Scrolling text marquees. Allows content authors to create eye-catching callouts on Web pages for special offers and other time critical information.

Client pull. Lets Microsoft Internet Explorer pull a sequence of graphics from a Web server to run simple animations.

Selectable fonts. The user has the option of setting fonts for pages where type face isn't specified.

Search button. There is now an Internet search button on the toolbar which enables you to jump quickly to your favorite page on the Internet.

Send Shortcut command. The File menu now contains a command that enables you to mail a shortcut to a favorite site directly to your colleagues and friends from Microsoft Internet Explorer.

New context menus. The Open And Save As command enables you to directly download and save a file by right-clicking the link and then downloading it.

Download status indicator. Now when you minimize Microsoft Internet Explorer during a download, the icon changes to give you a status indicator on the progress of the download.

Drag and drop status icon. The status icon at the lower-right corner of the main window is now a drag icon. Dragging this icon onto the desktop creates a shortcut to the current Web page.

Hot keys for Favorites. You can now associate hot-key combinations with your favorite sites.

VRML-ready. Microsoft will release a VRML browser. Microsoft Internet Explorer will be capable of displaying and browsing VRML worlds inline in a Web page by using this browser.

Easy to set up

The Internet Setup Wizard configures Windows 95 to use TCP/IP Networking, Dial-up Networking, and Microsoft Exchange e-mail. If you don't already have an account with an Internet service provider, the Internet Setup Wizard can sign you up for MSN - The Microsoft Network, reducing the whole signup and setup procedure to nothing more than typing in your name and address, selecting a payment method, and swapping disks.

If you already have an Internet service provider, the procedure is not much harder. The Internet Setup Wizard will not install the MSN components, but when it configures your TCP/IP protocol stack and Dial-Up Networking, you will need to know the following information:

1. The name of your service provider, your account name, password, and dial-up telephone number
2. Your IP address and subnet mask (these may not be required if your service provider automatically assigns these)
3. The address of your DNS server

1. Click the Start button, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Internet Tools.
2. Click Internet Setup Wizard.

When you have set up Windows 95 to work with the Internet, there are a number of ways that Microsoft Internet Explorer makes your experience of the Internet easier. It provides search tools and a tutorial to make it easier to find your way around the Internet. It also uses familiar Windows 95 technologies, such as shortcuts (or hyperlinks), to both better integrate with Windows 95 and to minimize the amount of new "stuff" that you have to learn.

The Microsoft Internet Explorer home page is one of the keys to getting the most out of the Internet with Internet Explorer. If you are new to the Internet, you will find the tutorial under "New to the Internet" full of useful information about the Internet and the World Wide Web, and how to use the Internet effectively. Under "Explore the Internet ", you will find a selection of the most useful and interesting links on the Internet—everything from a 1-800 telephone number directory to sports scores, and our top 10 favorite links.

The "Explore the Internet" page also contains links to the Yahoo, Lycos, and Infoseek search engines. These search engines are also accessible at any time just by clicking the Open Search Page button (the globe and magnifying glass) on the Internet Explorer toolbar. Think of these search pages as a card catalog of Web topics and services, which you can use to search for information on any subject.

Using Microsoft Internet Explorer is natural for Windows 95 users. Internet Explorer has many of the user interface improvements and system services that Windows 95 introduced, such as context menus, shortcuts, and drag and drop.

To start Microsoft Internet Explorer, just double-click the Internet icon on the Windows 95 desktop. The user interface is simple and easy to use, in a deliberate attempt to simplify working with the Web. At the top of the window is a short toolbar of buttons for common activities. As you would expect, if you pause the mouse over each button in turn, a short description of each is displayed. At the bottom of the window is the status bar, showing descriptive status text on the left and a download status meter on the right.

Internet shortcuts
Microsoft Internet Explorer extends Windows 95 shortcuts to include global Internet sites. These Internet shortcuts, or hyperlinks, are identical to the basic Windows 95 shortcut, except that instead of pointing to a file on the LAN or on a PC, they now point to a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) on the Internet. Like a standard Windows 95 shortcut, an Internet link can be embedded in a document, e-mailed to a friend or colleague, or stored in a folder on your PC, and any Windows 95 application can work with them.

In fact, Microsoft Internet Explorer is "drag-and-drop enabled" for creating shortcuts and much more. You can easily capture a graphic from a Web page by just dragging it to your desktop. Or you can drag a graphic or a shortcut back into the Internet Explorer window to display it.

Try this:

• Try dragging a hyperlink from a Web page onto the desktop. Hold the left mouse button down while pointing to the link you want to drag, and then move the pointer onto the desktop and release the mouse button. An Internet shortcut will be created.
• To create a link to the current page, rather than to a hyperlink on the current page, drag the status icon from the lower right-hand corner of the Internet Explorer window onto the desktop.
• Drag a graphic on the page onto the desktop. A .gif file will be created on the desktop.
• Drag links to different kinds of data and servers (such as gopher, ftp, or mail) onto the desktop. Different kinds of shortcuts will be created depending on the type of server.
• Double-click one of the shortcuts on the desktop. This will load it into Microsoft Internet Explorer.
• Drag another one of the shortcuts into Internet Explorer. The page which the shortcut represents will also be loaded.
• Drag a graphic into the Internet Explorer. The graphic will be loaded into Internet Explorer.

Context menus

Figure 2 Context menu for a Web page

Try right-clicking a graphic on a page, the page itself, and a link on that page. Like most Windows 95–based applications, Microsoft Internet Explorer supports context menus, accessible with a right-click on an object.

Figure 3 Context menu for a graphic with link

Smart URLs
A common problem for many users of the Internet is understanding what protocol is associated with a particular site on the net. Is it ftp, http, gopher, or some other protocol? Microsoft Internet Explorer determines the protocol at a particular site.

Try this:

• Double-click the Internet icon on your desktop to load Microsoft Internet Explorer.
• Type www.microsoft.com in the Address box at the top of the window.

Try this:

• Instead of clicking the Internet icon, click the Start button, and then click Run. Then type the name of the site (for example, www.microsoft.com). This even works from the command line (at the command prompt, type start www.microsoft.com). Using data, whether on the local PC or on the Internet, is easy and natural.

Designed for Windows 95
Finally, Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 is a great example of an application specifically designed for Windows 95. Internet Explorer 2.0 does the following:

• Multitasks well with other applications on Windows 95 because it's a Win32®-based application.
• Cooperates well with other communications applications because it uses TAPI.
• Works with over 900 different modems because it uses the Windows 95 Unimodem drivers.
• Interoperates with other Internet client applications because it uses Winsock.
• Shields the customer from technical details like Internet protocols, mime data types, and configuring helper applications, by registering these components in the Windows 95 registry.

Try this:

• To see the associations in the registry, click the Options menu, click View, then click the File Types tab. Note that Microsoft Internet Explorer has added associations for GIF, JPEG, and X Bitmap images, in addition to AU and AIFF sound files and a number of other types. Note also that protocols and viewers associations, such as Gopher, Telnet, and others, are stored here too. Fundamentally, the Windows 95 File Types database is being extended to encompass new types of data and protocols that exist now or may exist on the Internet in the future.

Performance

Responsive
Ask any Web user today what their number one complaint is, and they invariably answer "speed." Microsoft Internet Explorer implements a number of solutions to both speed up the Web and to allow multiple activities to occur at once while slower operations are taking place:

• The Internet Explorer user interface is multithreaded, so users can scroll through the client window while a page is downloading.
• As pages are downloaded, multiple connections to the server are used in order to make Internet Explorer as responsive as possible.
• Internet Explorer displays text on the page immediately, with placeholders for graphics that are progressively rendered as they are downloaded. This enables users to begin reading the content of a page immediately, without waiting for Internet Explorer to finish downloading graphics.
• Where the author has specified ALT tags and window sizes, the tags are displayed while the graphic is being downloaded, so that the user can make a choice about whether to wait for the graphic or move on.

Try This:

• Connect to www.home.msn.com. While the graphics are downloading, notice that you can scroll through the page, activate other hyperlinks, and view the ALT tags for the graphics as they are being downloaded.

Try this:

• To check your cache and history settings, click the Options menu, click View, and then click the Advanced tab.

Fast Connect
HTTP-KeepAlive is a protocol enhancement to the http protocol supported by some Web servers. Microsoft Internet Explorer now uses HTTP-KeepAlive to improve performance on servers which support it. HTTP Keep-Alive allows Internet Explorer to maintain an open connection to the Web server for multiple downloads. We call this capability Fast Connect. Other browsers close the connection after each graphic is downloaded from the server, and then must reopen it.

Also, because Internet Explorer is a Win32-based application, it multitasks well, which is an advantage during lengthy downloads.

History and Favorites
The second most frequent complaint that Internet users have today is that managing their lists of hot sites, and places they have been to, is too hard. Internet Explorer uses shortcuts to make it easier to manage the history of places you have been on the Internet, and your favorite places. Both History and Favorite places are stored as shortcuts in standard Windows 95 folders. This has several useful side effects:

• You can organize and categorize favorite places in folders, which you can then share with other people easily. Internet Explorer will display the contents of these folders as cascading menus off the main Favorites menu.
• Because Favorites and History items are just shortcuts, you can manage them more easily. All of the standard file operations, such as Copy, Delete, and Move, work on them. You can use the Windows 95 Find command to search for a particular shortcut. You can use Windows Explorer to sort them alphabetically, by last accessed date, or other criteria.
• You can easily mail a favorite shortcut to someone else by copying it into a mail message. You could even use that shortcut as part of a signature file, so that people reading your message could double-click your shortcut and go automatically to your Web site.

Try This:

• Click the Favorites menu, and then click Open Favorites. When the Favorites folder appears, right-click the folder icon in the top left corner of the window. You should see a context menu displayed, enabling you to search, share, and explore this folder. This is a convenient way to search a large tree of favorite places, which uses the default Windows 95 search engine to find the site you want.

New media
Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 incorporates HTML extensions to deliver inline video to customers. Web pages can be constructed to play video immediately after they are accessed, or in response to a user input. This is a simple extension to HTML which allows an .avi format video file to be played as part of the page.

Internet Explorer 2.0 also incorporates the ability for Web pages to play background sounds. Background sounds can be recorded in any of the popular formats available on the Internet today, including WAV, MIDI, AU, and AIFF. Uses for these background sounds include background music for individual pages or dramatic introductions to specific pages. Sounds can be set to overlap one another or to repeat, as required.

Other HTML extensions
Microsoft Internet Explorer implements two other extensions to HTML. The first extension enables content developers to specify typeface and color for text. This is an important step forward in Internet publishing. Until Internet Explorer, content designers were either forced to deliver content as large bitmapped images (time-consuming to download) or use the font selection of the viewer (with no guarantees how the page would look). The <FONT FACE> and <FONT COLOR> tags supported by Internet Explorer make it possible for the designer to exert a reasonable amount of control over a Web page, without resorting to large bitmap files.

The second extension implemented by Internet Explorer is the <MARQUEE> tag. This tag enables a designer to specify a section of text to be used as a moving marquee on a page. This is an effective callout for information (such as special sales information) that a content provider might want to put on a Web page.

Internet Explorer 2.0 supports all of the following currently popular Internet standards, and is an extensible platform to future standards.

HTML. Internet Explorer 2.0 supports popular HTML 3.0 enhancements, including tables, centered and aligned text, graphics, and more.

VRML. Internet Explorer 2.0 is "VRML-ready," which means that it has been designed to display inline VRML content on Web pages with the Microsoft VRML browser.

Security. Internet Explorer 2.0 supports the popular SSL encryption standard. In addition, Internet Explorer 2.0 is "STT-ready." This means that Internet Explorer 2.0 has the support hooks for the Microsoft/VISa Secure Transaction Technology already coded into it.

News. Internet Explorer 2.0 supports reading Usenet News by using the NNTP protocol, the standard protocol for reading news on the Internet.

Try This:

• To use Microsoft Internet Explorer to read news, click the Options menu, click View, and then click the News tab to set the name of your NNTP server.
• Next, type the URL for the news group you want to read—for example, news:comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy.

Proxies. The CERN proxy server and others are supported by Internet Explorer.

fs Copyright © 1996 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.