TidBITS#465/01-Feb-99

TidBITS#465/01-Feb-99
=====================

Netscape and Microsoft have updated their Web browsers recently,
but are you taking full advantage of the new features? This week
Adam looks in detail at what's new and improved (or new and lousy)
in the two Web browsing behemoths. Also this week, Jeff Carlson
examines eMerge, a program that lets you use mail merge features
for personalizing email. In the news, Connectix updates Virtual
Game Station despite being sued by Sony, and Bare Bones releases
BBEdit 5.0.2.

Topics:
MailBITS/01-Feb-99
Legitimate Direct Email eMerges
Driving the 4.5 Web Browsers

<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-465.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/issues/1999/TidBITS#465_01-Feb-99.etx>

Copyright 1999 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
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MailBITS/01-Feb-99
------------------

**Virtual Game Station 1.1 Released Despite Lawsuit** -- Connectix
Corporation has shipped Virtual Game Station 1.1, an update to the
company's Sony PlayStation emulator, introduced at Macworld Expo
in San Francisco. Few details were available regarding the changes
in version 1.1, although Connectix did say that they've "enhanced
compatibility and functionality," plus added additional security
technology to prevent use of pirated PlayStation games. Most
likely because of a lawsuit brought by Sony, it's been impossible
to purchase the $49 Virtual Game Station other than at the show,
but Connectix's online store expects availability by 06-Feb-99.
Those who managed to purchase Virtual Game Station 1.0 at Macworld
Expo can download a free 828K updater. [ACE]

<http://www.virtualgamestation.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05242>

**Free BBEdit 5.0.2 Update Available** -- Bare Bones Software has
released a BBEdit 5.0.2 update, free to registered owners of
BBEdit 5.0 or 5.0.1. The 5.0.2 update rolls BBEdit's FTP client
into the main application, and includes a number of fixes to
BBEdit and its HTML tools, along with support for nestable include
files and the capability to select multiple items in many of
BBEdit's browser windows. The update, which Bare Bones recommends
for all BBEdit 5 users, is a 1.9 MB download. [GD]

<http://web.barebones.com/products/bbedit/rnotes.html>
<http://web.barebones.com/support/update.html>

Legitimate Direct Email eMerges
-------------------------------
by Jeff Carlson <[email protected]>

Like most people, I'm no big fan of unsolicited commercial email.
Every day I'm offered credit card deals, home-based business
schemes, and plenty of badly spelled invitations to visit adult
Web sites. TidBITS has published articles about how to deal with
spam (see "Responding to Spam" in TidBITS-442_), and we also filed
one of the first lawsuits under Washington State's anti-spam law
(see "TidBITS Sues Spammer" in TidBITS-439_).

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05032>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05000>

In our rush to blot out spam, however, we've obscured the fact
that legitimate uses for direct email software do exist. I know,
because I send out my share of bulk personalized messages on a
regular basis using Galleon Software's well-crafted program
eMerge.

<http://www.galleon.com/emerge/>

**One to One, en Masse** -- One of the reasons for using
computers, theoretically, is to make our lives easier. Instead of
writing multiple variations of one email message, it's much better
to send one letter customized for several recipients, saving you
literally hours of effort. In addition to addressing recipients by
name, the outgoing messages can include information specific to
each person. Shareware developers, for example, could notify
existing customers of product updates, perhaps inserting
appropriate upgrade information or unique registration codes with
each message.

As another example, consider one of my clients, a company that
organizes conferences. They regularly send thank-you letters to
attendees following events. Granted, the message is mostly
boilerplate, but addressing each person individually helps
contribute a level of personal contact that encourages repeat
business. More importantly, my client can easily use the
information stored in customer databases without having to
reinvent the wheel each time. Similarly, a band could send
customized messages to fans in a particular area, with details of
upcoming performances and even individualized driving directions.

**Join the Campaign** -- Think of eMerge not so much as a bulk
sender, but as the email equivalent of the mail merge feature
found in most word processors. When you launch eMerge, you're
presented with an untitled "campaign," consisting of the Message
Header (fields for Name, Address, and Subject), the Letter, and a
List field. If you have Internet Config or Apple's Internet
control panel (part of Mac OS 8.5) installed, the Name and Address
fields will be filled in with your information. After you've typed
or pasted the text of the letter, you can customize it by choosing
items from the Standard Variables and Custom Variables pop-up
menus that match the structure of your List data (see below).
Variables are indicated in colored text and marked with double
greater-than and less-than symbols, as in this example:

Hello <<firstname>>! It's great that you'll be attending the
<<lastname>> family reunion.

Editing the Custom Variables list lets you define variables
specific to your source data; one of my clients, for example,
wanted to alert customers whose contact information was
inconsistent by displaying existing and new mailing addresses.

**Building a List** -- If you're planning to send to only a few
addresses, you can enter them manually. However, in most cases
you'll want to import contact information from an outside source,
a task made easy thanks to the many options for parsing contact
data.

eMerge can import text files in a variety of configurations,
including files exported from Claris Emailer, Outlook Express,
LetterRip, and PowerMail, plus Netscape Address Book and Eudora
Nicknames files. In my experience, tab-delimited text files work
best; just select the radio button describing the arrangement of
the data (such as Internet Address / FirstName / LastName). If
your data isn't structured according to the preexisting options,
it's easy enough to open the text file in a spreadsheet like
Excel, rearrange the columns, then export the data again. A handy
checkbox in eMerge's Import window also lets you eliminate blank
addresses.

If you don't have pre-formatted data, you can use eMerge's dredge
feature, which scans a file or folder and extracts email
addresses. This could be handy, for instance, for collating email
addresses from Read Me files when asking for permission to include
shareware programs on a CD-ROM. Although this is the most
blatantly spam-like feature in eMerge, whether or not it's abused
is up to the user. Unlike unscrupulous spammers, Galleon downplays
this feature on its Web site and in the documentation.

A campaign can also include attachments, and Galleon Software
earns extra points for noting in their documentation that some
mail servers can have troubles with attachments larger than 32K.
They also receive bonus kudos for writing that multiple
attachments "end up tying up a lot of storage space and generally
contribute to the growing congestion on the Internet."

When it's time to distribute your campaign, eMerge offers a
preview of each outgoing message, making it easier to see if the
list data is being correctly applied. When you're ready to send,
eMerge delivers the messages directly by default (it can also send
through your normal mail server), using up to 24 simultaneous
connections depending on the bandwidth available. When completed,
each list item is marked with a status flag indicating whether the
mail was sent or not, and the likely cause of each failure.
Afterwards, you can export the list and include the status
reports.

**Legitimacy in the Woodwork** -- I suspect that there's more of a
demand for direct email than is apparent, since no legitimate
business wants to be labeled as a spammer. In the end, the
difference lies in approach: legitimate users will use eMerge
responsibly to send personalized email to people who have asked to
receive it. Spammers won't bother to use eMerge since it lacks
features for hijacking mail servers, forging headers, and trawling
the Web for email addresses. With its straightforward approach and
easy to use interface, eMerge seems to be the quiet program that's
getting the job done. eMerge is available for $99, and can be
purchased online at Galleon Software's Web site, or from select
online vendors (including TidBITS sponsor Digital River). The
eMerge installer is a 1.5 MB download, and a demo is available
from Galleon.

<http://www.galleon.com/emerge/purchase/>
<ftp://ftp.galleon.com/pub/eMergeDemo.sea.hqx>

Driving the 4.5 Web Browsers
----------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[email protected]>

Web browsers are probably among the least upgraded pieces of
software, despite being essentially free and frequently updated.
The TidBITS Web site still sees about 1,000 hits per week from
people using MacWeb, a now-defunct Web browser bundled with early
editions of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh. The fact is, if a
specific version of a Web browser works for you, why change?
Eventually something encourages a switch, but it's not uncommon
for people to jump several versions at a time. I fully understand
that inertia, but when both Netscape Communicator and Microsoft
Internet Explorer reached version 4.5, I was eager to try them
out. I wasn't disappointed; both are decidedly better than
previous releases.

<http://home.netscape.com/download/>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/ie/>

**Design Mentalities** -- Discussions with developers at both
Netscape and Microsoft helped me place these releases in the
context of the overall history of each program.

Netscape Communicator 4.5 offers relatively few feature
enhancements to its Web browser - most of the important changes
were to improve performance and enhance the mail and news
components of the package, which I'm not looking at here. However,
I was told by Netscape that if you don't use the mail and news
parts of Netscape Communicator, the program won't load them into
memory. In short, although using Communicator solely as a Web
browser may waste disk space, it shouldn't use much more memory
than the stand-alone Netscape Navigator Web browser, which hasn't
been updated to 4.5. Internet Explorer's memory model isn't clear
either: even when there's plenty of memory available, Internet
Explorer 4.5 can still complain it's running critically low,
especially with complex pages and multiple windows.

Netscape said that many fixes and new ideas are being held for the
5.0 version of Netscape Communicator, which will be the first open
source release. That release will also reportedly feature a new
page rendering engine plus additional standards support. If you
have time on your hands, you can check out the pre-release
versions.

<http://www.mozilla.org/>

With Internet Explorer 4.5, Microsoft added a number of new
features to enhance the Web browsing experience. What hasn't
changed is standards support - Microsoft decided to put off
improving standards support for the 5.0 release. With this
decision, Microsoft walks a fine line - obviously, improving the
Web browsing experience will benefit almost everyone, whereas
relatively few Web users care about standards support. However,
standards advocates have good reason to be vocal about their
concerns, since support for open standards is the basis of the
Internet.

Thinking about these two Web browsers, I realized that even the
new or recently added features are moving along the same lines,
making the two releases quite comparable. Let's look at some of
the similar areas, starting with the one everyone asks about:
performance and stability.

**Performance and Stability** -- Both Netscape Communicator 4.5
and Internet Explorer 4.5 are somewhat faster than previous
releases. As I've discussed in the past, making statistically
significant performance comparisons of Web browsers is difficult
at best. So, I'll say merely that both browsers feel faster than
their previous releases... for about two days. After that, you
stop noticing the change from the previous version, and they're
both too slow again.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04906>

I see stability as a similar situation - neither program is as
stable or reliable as would be ideal. That said, there appear to
be more anecdotal bug reports on the Internet about Internet
Explorer 4.5 than about Netscape Communicator 4.5.

<http://www.macfixit.com/reports/explorer4.5.shtml>

**Navigation Enhancements** -- Netscape Communicator 4.5 now
supports the Command-click shortcut Internet Explorer uses to open
a link in a new window. Command-clicking a link is far faster and
easier than using the pop-up contextual menus long supported by
both browsers. Unfortunately, predicting where Communicator will
open new windows is difficult (especially on multiple monitor
setups), which reduces the utility of the feature.

For people without multiple monitors (or for whom multiple windows
aren't realistic) Microsoft added a feature called Page Holder to
Internet Explorer. A new Page Holder tab on the left-hand Explorer
bar lets you temporarily store a page for the purpose of quickly
viewing its links in the main window. Microsoft aimed this feature
at people who read headline-oriented sites and want to follow most
of the links. I prefer to view such links in new windows, but if
you do use Page Holder, note that you can and should expand the
width of that pane so the page stored there is readable.

**Printing** -- Microsoft has finally improved Web browser

printing capabilities. I occasionally print a Web page of driving
directions, a map, or even a TidBITS article I need on paper.
Internet Explorer 4.5 provides a Print Preview command, and while
viewing the page within the Print Preview dialog box, you can
choose to shrink the page to fit, crop wide pages, or print wide
pages. You can also print headers and footers (which include the
page title, date, URL, and page number), the background (good to
avoid in most cases), and images.

Although these printing features are a great start, they need
work. First, the Print Preview dialog box is both oddly designed
and system-modal, so you can't do anything else on the Macintosh
until you dismiss it. It should be either application-modal or
even non-modal. Second, Internet Explorer can't print multiple
frames on a page, though you can choose which frame to print by
clicking in that frame before choosing Print Preview. Finally, the
Print Background checkbox could be interpreted as being related to
background printing - better wording might be "Print Page
Backgrounds." I've also seen a few cosmetic artifacts in the
preview that didn't appear in the printout.

Netscape doesn't trumpet this fact, but Communicator 4.5 also
includes improved printing capabilities. Hidden in a pop-up menu
in the Page Setup dialog box are options that tell Communicator
4.5 to fit the Web page to a piece of paper while printing and to
avoid printing the Web page background. These features are
extremely welcome, although I'd encourage Netscape to make them
more prominent and add a print preview.

**Making Relationships** -- Microsoft beefed up support for Apple
technologies by integrating Internet Explorer 4.5 with Sherlock
(although support for Navigation Services is still lacking).
Unfortunately, the three options aren't useful. One lets you open
Sherlock, another summarizes the page to the clipboard, and the
third theoretically finds similar sites. This third feature would
be great if it worked, but it makes searching more like working
with Scooby Doo than Sherlock Holmes.

The reason this integration fails is twofold. First, Microsoft
chose to feed Sherlock the first 100 characters from the META
DESCRIPTION tag, if present, and if not, to work from the first
100 characters in the page text. In a case like an issue of
TidBITS, where we have both META DESCRIPTION and META KEYWORDS
tags, Sherlock would probably be better served by using our
keywords. Working from the description is a good idea, but
truncating it to 100 characters hamstrings the search. Searching
based on the first 100 characters of the page text is generally
useless in cases where the META tags don't exist, such as our home
page, since it hits our non-representative navigation bar text.
Second, relying on META tags at all is error-prone, since most Web
pages don't include descriptive tags. Even when these tags do
appear, their contents are often site-specific, not page-specific,
which leads to inaccurate results.

Netscape chose a different approach. Communicator 4.5 includes the
Smart Browsing feature that first appeared in Communicator 4.06.
Smart Browsing encompasses two separate features: What's Related
and Internet Keywords (see below). What's Related works with the
Web catalog on Netscape's NetCenter site to provide a listing of
sites that are related to the site you're viewing. It's fairly
accurate, returning sites like MacWEEK, Macworld, MWJ, and Apple
when asked what is related to TidBITS.

However, What's Related thinks only in terms of _sites_. For
instance, I noticed on the Cornell University Web site that Joan
Brumberg's excellent book The Body Project had won an award, but
when I check What's Related while on the page about the book's
award, I get a listing of other universities, which are totally
unrelated to the book. If you keep this limitation in mind, What's
Related should prove more useful.

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0679735291/tidbitselectro00A/>

**Completion Freaks** -- Two new features in Internet Explorer
4.5, AutoFill and AutoComplete, make filling in forms on the Web
much easier. AutoFill, which you access by clicking a toolbar
button, automatically fills in your contact information (which you
enter in the preferences) in Web forms. It accomplishes this by
reading the form's HTML and figuring out what information should
go where. It's brilliant; I can't tell you how much I enjoy not
entering my address and telephone number. Although Microsoft has
explicitly told me they do not collect this information, if it
bothers you, don't use the feature.

AutoComplete works in any field but requires that you teach it
words to complete, which you can do in the preferences or by
Control-clicking a completed form and choosing Add to AutoComplete
List. My only complaint is that AutoComplete also uses the
AutoFill information, which means that if I type a 4 or a 9 in a
field, AutoComplete tries to fill in my phone number or ZIP code
(which start with those digits). Perhaps Microsoft could require
the user to enter two or three characters before AutoComplete
kicks in.

Although URL auto-completion was available in earlier versions of
Communicator on other platforms, Communicator 4.5 is the first
version to sport it on the Macintosh. Like Internet Explorer,
Communicator now auto-completes URLs (and Internet keywords, see
below) as you type them in the Location field. Unlike Internet
Explorer, Communicator's URL auto-completion doesn't consider
bookmark titles, which are the pages you're most likely to want to
revisit.

Netscape's Internet Keywords feature is a nice touch. Whereas
you're used to being able to type "apple" in the Location field
and go to www.apple.com, Internet Keywords routes entries in that
field through a database at Netscape that attempts to go one
better than DNS on looking up the name. So, you can type
"Southwest Airlines" and end up at www.iflyswa.com or "Apple iMac"
end up at the iMac's Web page. Internet Keywords is only as good
as its database, so if there's no direct match, the Internet
Keywords site redirects to a NetCenter search.

**Bitter Better Bookmarks** -- One welcome enhancement to Netscape
Communicator 4.5 is a bookmarks toolbar that displays user-
specified bookmarks within the browser window. Plus, you can
choose any folder of bookmarks to display in that toolbar by
editing your bookmarks, then choosing Set as Toolbar Folder from
the View menu. That command joins two other useful options, Set as
New Bookmarks Folder and Set as Bookmark Menu Folder that let you
determine where new bookmarks go by default and what folder
displays in your Bookmarks menu. I found this handy when switching
bookmark sets between browsers.

Internet Explorer has long featured the Favorites toolbar, and
although I hadn't previously realized this, it displays the
contents of whatever favorites folder is called "Toolbar
Favorites". You can thus switch between different folders in the
Favorites toolbar by renaming folders.

Microsoft also slightly reworked the Favorites tab on the Explorer
bar, demoting channels into Favorites (which is better from an
interface point of view than the previous approach, but denigrates
the channel technology to the point where no one will discover
it). Also new in the Favorites tab are buttons for adding and
organizing favorites.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05051>

Overall, the bookmark features of both browsers are just good
enough that I no longer look for external bookmark utilities.
Plenty of improvement is possible, though, particularly when
working with the history of visited pages. Netscape Communicator
desperately needs a persistent history and Microsoft could do some
work on letting the user quickly filter the list of history
entries.

**Sizing Fonts** -- Netscape Communicator 4.5 now sports commands
for changing the font size of a page, which is essential when you
come across a site designed for Windows users. Because Windows
thinks monitors use a screen resolution of 96 dpi by default,
rather than the Mac's 72 dpi, Windows-based Web designers often
lower the font size so text doesn't appear too large for Windows
users. Mac users are then faced with tiny text that's hard to
read.

Although Communicator doesn't have toolbar buttons for the View
menu's Increase Font Size and Decrease Font Size commands, there
are keyboard shortcuts. In my testing, unfortunately, Communicator
wasn't able to change the font size on many pages reliably,
although sometimes it seemed to be changing the font in tiny
increments, thus requiring numerous invocations. With luck, this
feature will improve in 5.0 and include some indication of how
you've changed the font size.

**Installation and Updates** -- Although it still requires that
numerous files be installed into your System Folder, Internet
Explorer adopted the drag-install and self-repair technologies
from Office 98. This enables you to avoid running an installation
program or worrying that you've thrown out some essential file,
with the trade-off being an increased disk footprint. I like these
technologies, but I'd prefer that programs didn't need so many
files in the first place.

Netscape Communicator has a SmartUpdate feature that purportedly
helps download and install new versions of the software
automatically. I haven't seen it do anything yet, so I can't say
how well it works. For Internet Explorer 4.0, Microsoft used to
provide a channel that could notify you of updates to Internet
Explorer, but now that channels aren't popular at Microsoft,
there's no automated notification or update help available.

Microsoft is proud of their drag-install and self-repair
technologies; although they're neat, I'd rather see effort being
put into simplifying the update process. Netscape might be doing
that with SmartUpdate, but it's too soon to tell. Both programs
could learn from Peter Lewis's Anarchie Pro, which uses SIVC
(Simple Internet Version Control) to check for updates and prompt
the user to download them.

**Making a Choice** -- In the end, I find myself using Internet
Explorer 4.5, mostly for the same reasons I did seven months ago -
Communicator has too many minor annoyances that bog down my Web
browsing. There are those mentioned above, plus Communicator still
redraws the entire page if you resize the window, and its history
feature is still session-based and window-specific, which I find
useless. And finally, the download status at the bottom of the
browser window is often drawn over a barbershop pole display,
which renders it unreadable.

I have fewer gripes about Internet Explorer, and the problems I do
encounter don't occur regularly. For instance, I've seen Internet
Explorer 4.5 become confused when switching from a modem to a
dedicated connection without quitting the program in between.
Similar problems have occurred when I leave Explorer running on a
PowerBook that moves between having a connection and being
disconnected. Also, although you can rearrange the Favorites Bar,
Address Bar, and Button Bar, Internet Explorer at times forgets
the position of my Favorites Bar after I've moved it onto the same
line as the Address Bar.

For me, then, fewer annoyances, plus Microsoft's addition of
AutoFill and AutoComplete, and vastly improved printing
capabilities, make Internet Explorer my Macintosh Web browser of
choice... for the moment. Netscape released Communicator 4.5 in
the middle of October, and Internet Explorer 4.5 shipped at
Macworld Expo in January, a short two and a half months later. I
wouldn't be surprised to see Internet Explorer's new features
appear in Communicator 5.0, along with other major improvements,
and Microsoft undoubtedly has big plans for Internet Explorer 5.0,
due sometime later this year. As long as Macintosh development on
Communicator doesn't lag due to America Online's purchase of
Netscape, we should enjoy continued improvements on both sides.
Otherwise, there's Opera, which might ship a Macintosh version one
of these years.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05189>
<http://www.operasoftware.com/alt_os.html>

$$

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