Nik Rawlinson

Has Microsoft given up on the web? It was late to the party and, like the proverbial pooper, it seems to be bailing out before it gets too drunk, falls asleep in the corner and has its eyebrows shaved off.

To start with, it has ceased development of its Mac-based Internet Explorer. There is talk of its agreement with Apple coming to an end and prompting a bout of towel throwing.

But I suspect that the great strides made by the Newtonian hardware manufacturer on its own Safari browser may have had more than a little to do with it.

No great loss, you may say - Apple is relatively small fry on the desktop, compared to Windows at least.

But look at its PC offering. Internet Explorer for the PC - currently on version 6 - has barely changed in the past two years.

It's older than even Windows XP and, if we're already seeing leaked code of Longhorn, XP's heir apparent, we should surely be seeing far more from a comparatively simple product line.

Beyond a service pack and the occasional patch through Windows Update though, it has sat pretty, going nowhere and being overtaken by almost every other browser on the market.

There's probably a superhighway joke in there somewhere - overtaking and all that - but I'll spare you the agony.

In my opinion, Explorer is one of the least flexible and useful browsers going, and one on which I gave up many months ago.

Sure, it's got some good back-end stuff. Most people can understand its security settings and it is highly configurable - behind the scenes.

But what good would a film be if behind-the-scenes catering and crew were first class, but what appeared on the screen wasn't worth watching?

So, what's wrong with the world's favourite browser? First and foremost it's the lack of tabs. Perhaps to the rain-soaked developers of leafy Redmond, a tab is still a high-caffeine hit that was the mainstay of overnight coding sessions in the mid-1980s.

To the rest of us browser defectors, though, it's the main reason we'll never go back to Internet Explorer. Tabs let you open multiple sites in a single window and then click back and forth between them. It's almost impossible to use Google properly without them.

And while we're on the subject, where is the Google integration? Opera and Safari have Google search boxes built in, while Netscape and Mozilla let you prowl directories from the address bar.

Explorer gives it the royal brush off; if it can't find the site you're looking for it drags out some suggestions from MSN Search. It's not what one would call an elegant solution to a common problem. Perhaps those rumours of Microsoft looking to set up a Google competitor had some merit after all.

The Google engineers have partly remedied this uncomfortable situation by developing a Googlebar plug-in that adds search and navigation features to the Explorer interface, at the cost of browsing-window real estate. If you're still running at 800 x 600 it's a sacrifice you shouldn't have to make.

Applying skins is a two-click operation in Mozilla and Netscape, not so with IE. And with both being multi-platform releases, using an architecture that has standardised across Windows, Mac OS and Linux, I have confidence in building my life around a standard calendar plug-in, aggregator plug-in, sidebar configuration, email package, address book ... the list is endless.

If one day I finally make the switch lock, stock and clichéd smoking barrel away from the Windows platform then I'll just carry on working with familiar tools and have nothing new to learn.

To be fair, there is a FAQ for running the Unix release of Explorer, but have you ever seen it? More to the point, have you ever seen the software to which it relates, or know anyone who runs it?

Times have moved on, and the net is no longer something we simply browse, devoting a whole window to each page.

Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that IE is so closely married to a lot of Microsoft's products. Money, Picture It and even Windows Update rely on its underlying technology to run, and perhaps messing with its insides might be cause for concern on Microsoft's other development teams.

What would happen if the introduction of tabs killed Encarta stone dead, or stopped us getting Windows hot-fixes the moment they were released?

Has Microsoft painted itself into a corner from which it now cannot escape? If so, fine. There is nothing wrong with Explorer per se - it does what it says it will, and it does it well - it just doesn't do half the things I expect of a modern browser.

As such, I'm happy to leave it there, chugging away in the background as it helps sort out my accounts, edit my holiday snaps or keep my PC bug-free.

Just don't expect me to use it to explore the internet the way Microsoft would like me to.

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