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The LangaLetter

A free email newsletter from Fred Langa

Week of 12/07/97

IE4, and Now, Nav 4: The Saga Continues
Last week’s release of IE4.01 helped some people by resolving or at least ameliorating a number of "issues" with the 4.0 version. But what we saw in the first postings from those who tried 4.01, a number of problems remain, and perhaps some new ones have been added.

  • A "cannot follow URL" problem has cropped up a lot. Bill Gray (an engineer from HP) sent me a letter on the solutions he found---and the response he got from MS tech support. I posted his note in the BBS.
  • A second seemingly common issue is an apparent incompatibility between RegClean and IE4.01. Users report if you run RegClean, you'll break IE, and restoring the .reg file doesn't fix the problem.
  • Version sniffing: People are getting different version numbers from fresh IE4.01 installs. We're trying to track this down in the BBS thread. It may be that different component mixes yield different final version numbers--- you may need an algorithm to figure out what's really installed on your system. Yikes!
  • Lots of other problems reported, with ATI drivers, Desktop Themes, and setup issues among the most common.

Last week, I also tried Netscape Communicator Professional 4.03, which I had on CD. (I know 4.04 is out; I'll get to that in a moment.)  Guess what?---4.03 was broken in some major ways too. One painful example: Communicator 4.03 could not load any of the pages at http://www.langa.com! Ouch!

There went my Wednesday evening. Navigator/Communicator still is the world's most popular browser, so I couldn't leave the site inaccessible. I tore out the parts of my site that I thought might be causing trouble and then took the opportunity to design and apply a custom FrontPage 98 Web Theme to the site, totally overhauling the look and feel. What the heck---once I got into it, I simplified the navigation, made the type more readable, and reshuffled the pages into a better order.

Please take a look at the new http://www.langa.com and let me know what you think of the design! Note that if you bookmarked any pages there before, you may need to start fresh from the top page (use the link above) because many page names and positions got changed.

Back to Navigator: I also had an unhappy experience trying to run IE4.01 and Communicator 4.03 on the same system: At one point, the hard drive went into permanent thrash and I had to cold boot to make it stop. Ugly. I don't know where to point the finger; Communicator 4.03 did have bugs, as I found out in 4.03's refusal to view any Langa.Com page. But turning off IE's active desktop also solved the disk thrash problem. Comm or IE--- either could be the culprit here.

Communicator Version 4.04 is now out; I'll try that as soon as I can. I've attempted two separate downloads of the 17MB file from the Netscape site so far, using two different machines--- but both times, the file downloaded but would not finish writing to disk. The progress indicator froze on literally the last 1K of a 17MB file; I could download everything but the "all done" byte. Sigh.

I'll try it again from a third machine ASAP

The ATI Patch
ATI boards are among the world's most popular, so I guess it's no surprise that I got lots of email last week asking about the ATI patch. It's really simple---if you have an ATI card that's having trouble with IE4 (or any other Windows app), use Notepad or Sysedit to open System.Ini. In the [Display] section, add the line DevBmp=0 . That's it. Just reboot, and there's a good chance the problem will go away.

But there's a catch: The patch does exact a performance penalty. See below.

IE4's Performance Impact on ATI, Diamond, Matrox Video Cards
I did a lot of timing tests last week to try to quantify the performance impact of IE4's Desktop Update and Active Desktop on ATI, Diamond, and Matrox-equipped systems; and separately, to quantify the impact of the ATI patch.

The short answer is, yes, installing any of these things---Desktop Update, enabling Active Desktop, and/or using the ATI patch will slow your system down. The amount of slowdown can be anything from a trifle you'd never notice to something more serious. I believe my tests are the first published results to actually quantify how much the slowdown is---you'll find the timing results at the heart of this week's WinMag column, available Monday morning and running all week. You can read it and decide for yourself if the performance impact is significant enough that you should be concerned.

Please stop by—and please continue posting your IE4 and Comm/Nav 4 experiences here so we all can learn from each other’s successes and failures. The more info we share, the better informed we’ll all be!

ATI Footnote
ATI told me their newest drivers obviate the need for the DevBmp=0 patch. They couldn't tell me if they're just turning off DevBmp support within the driver instead of within the System.Ini file, or if they've really solved the problem in a way that doesn't exact a performance penalty. But to their credit, ATI is being open---they sent me some loaner video cards I'll be testing with the old and new drivers. Of course, I'll tell you what I find.

WWW.Langa.Com
As mentioned earlier, the site has a whole new look and navigation. After a less-than stellar experiment with small type last week (sorry!) I've selected a larger, open, readable type for the Langa.Com and the LangaLetter. It should work well with systems using default font settings on the desktop and browser. Please let me know if you run into problems.

LangaLetter
You folks are great---I got a lot of helpful mail suggesting ways to make the newsletter better and to avoid problems I hadn't anticipated. Reader Rob Farrel, for example, told me that putting "free" in the LangaLetter's subject line will trigger some spam filters, causing the letter to be deleted before it's seen. Art Reiman said that using "friends@langa.com" as the target address can do the same thing. And Philip de Lisle suggested using a fixed-width table within the HTML version of the letter to avoid mile-wide paragraphs. Several of you had trouble with the typeface I was using, which was coming out too small on your systems. I've tried to solve all these issues in this week's Letter: Thanks for the feedback, and please let me know if something's not working from your end!

BrowserTune98
We completed the last behind-the-scenes infrastructure tests. I'll be able to post beta pages very soon now!

HotSpots
Hope you've been keeping up with HotSpots---there've been some really great sites there in the last few weeks. This week is a mix of the serious and the silly:

  • Sunday: Is there too much sax and violence on the web? 8-)
  • Monday: You'll need hype filters, but there's a ton of useful info in here.
  • Tuesday: How many English-language Norwegian sites have you seen?
  • Wednesday: A labor-of-love JavaScript site.
  • Thursday: How does your (or your company's) web site rank?
  • Friday: I had to do this at least once this month!
  • Saturday: A deep topic engagingly presented for young scientists.

Always Looking for More HotSpots!
The HotSpots mailbox is always open! Whenever you find a great site, could you take a second and tell me about it? It'd just take a minute--- email your favorite URLs to hotspots@langa.com. No explanation is needed---just paste the raw URLs into the body of the mail message, ideally, 1 URL per line. I'll sift through them and queue 'em up for possible inclusion as future HotSpot. Thanks!

See you next week!

Fred
(fred@langa.com)


A live web version of this note is online in  the "what's new" section of http://www.langa.com.

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