This poses something of a problem for the reviewer: do you review the product or the behavior? Our solution, given the stakes involved, is to review both. If you're only interested in what we have to say about IE's capabilities, you can skip the following paragraph and go straight to the product review. But you shouldn't: Microsoft's anti-competitive practices affect every Internet user—indeed, every computer user—in one way or another, generally for the worse.

To put it as simply and bluntly as possible, Microsoft appears to be leveraging the popularity of its Windows 95 operating system to reward Internet service providers and PC manufacturers for choosing Explorer over Netscape, and to punish them if they don't make that choice. Simply shrewd marketing, you say? Not if the charges Netscape and others make are true, among them the allegation that manufacturers must pay extra for each licensed copy of Win 95 if they don't also bundle Explorer (and exclude Netscape). Microsoft has posted an angry, self-serving response to the Netscape charges; we suggest you read it, then read the PC Week story "PC Makers: Microsoft used pressure tactics" as a counterpoint and corrective. Finally, talk to everyone you know who works in the computer industry (outside of Microsoft, that is), and draw your own conclusions. We have (we did six months ago), and we believe the situation is getting out of hand.

(Editor's Note: some of the articles cited above are no longer available online.)

But suppose you don't care whether Microsoft is violating antitrust laws, much less how anyone characterizes the company's ethics ("company" and "ethics" amounting to a non sequitur, in your view). You just want the best and coolest browser out there, and you want to know whether IE 3.0 is it. Well, sorry: it's not.

This product has a couple of major strikes against it, apart from questionable corporate behavior. The first: it is not cross-platform. Microsoft will tell you it is, of course. But the Mac product is a generation behind (and a generation behind Netscape 2.0, for that matter), and a Unix product does not yet exist. You say you run Win 95, so you don't care? Then you should care about this: outside of a few Windows-specific innovations, IE 3.0 continues to trail Netscape in almost every significant respect.

Let's start with the bugs. We tested Explorer 3.0 on a Windows 95 machine with 16 MB of RAM and a crowded hard drive, and it took us three attempts to successfully download and install it. Why? Because when Microsoft released the "final" version, it required a mind-boggling 65 MB (!) of hard disk space for installation. This has supposedly since been corrected, as has a serious security flaw (you must download a patch). Once installed, IE ran acceptably, but it is nowhere near as quick as Netscape (2.0 or 3.0) on the same machine. IE's ActiveMovie audio and video playback struck us as particularly sluggish. We were also unimpressed with ActiveX, which is, yet again, platform-specific and which meets no particular need that can't be better met elsewhere—except to co-opt the Internet for Windows.

Don't we have anything nice to say about Internet Explorer 3.0? Actually, we do. IE 3.0 is the second-best browser in the world. The fact that we give it a three-star rating in spite of all the drawbacks outlined above is a strong testimonial. For Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 users, it is an attractive alternative (though not necessarily a superior one) to Netscape. It is perhaps 70% derivative to 30% original, but there is nothing inherently wrong with that. And 3.0 has made some real strides—cascading style sheets, an Explorer exclusive, make a significant new contribution to Web-page display capabilities.

If Microsoft would devote as much energy to this sort of innovation as it does to its Machiavellian marketing schemes, Explorer would have a real shot at overtaking Netscape on legitimate grounds. As it stands, though, Netscape Navigator remains the technological and spiritual leader of the Web.

(Reviewed September 2, 1996)