Wednesday was a big day for Web browsers as new bugs were discovered in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5 browser and the latest version of Netscape’s Communicator browser suite was released.
According to Bugnet, which monitors anomalies in computer programs, IE5 and Microsoft’s (MSFT) MSHTML editing and rendering engine may cause trouble for users working in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) applications.
The browser will not register quotation marks in some HTML programming, and while the code reads fine without the quotes in standard browsers, many Web developers are concerned because the lack of quotations is not compliant with XML standards. Web forms filled out by IE5 users therefore can’t be used in some XML database applications.
So far, the only solution Microsoft has offered is to save HTML as “Web Page, HTML Only” rather than the “Web Page, complete” saving option. With this method, however, images, sounds and other non-text components will not be saved.
Microsoft also Wednesday released a patch to a number of IE security holes. The patch resolves a problem with IE’s ImportExportFavorites feature, which opened up lists of frequently visited Web sites for anyone to transfer. The patch also addresses problems with ActiveX, which allows scripts to run on IE.
For those concerned with Internet Explorer’s stability, the latest version of Netscape’s Communicator browser was released this week. Version 4.7 now includes a “shop” button and date system for build numbers. Users can download Windows, Mac and UNIX versions from here.