I love WebExplorer for OS/2. It works quite well for the casual user's needs. It formats pages nicely, handles tables, transparent images, background images and all the other neat stuff that makes OS/2 e-Zine! tick. In fact, compared with what we all took for granted a year ago, it's beautiful. And that would be enough to keep me happy.

If not for Netscape.

The inconveniences of HTML I can deal with. Playing catch up I can not. I'm not going to rant about Netscape though; that's Chris' job this month. As much as I take exception to some of their practices, there is nothing wrong with innovation so I won't fault them for that. Instead, I would like to see the WebExplorer team take advantage of some of Netscape's "modern" features before they become last year's news.

Sure they're not HTML compliant--and I do maintain that we need standards--but that is no reason not to see what amazing things we can do with WebEx. Why not implement them now and when (or if) the community finalizes standards make the needed modifications? It's not rocket science guys and girls.

You know, since Netscape has grabbed dominance of the browser market, it seems someone has finally shown Microsoft that they can't take any pie they want. Wouldn't it be nice if WebExplorer was so cool and had such amazing features that it had the same kind of sway? Imagine people reading reviews about how great it was and saying, "Gee, I'd better check out this OS/2 thing." In case you haven't noticed, there isn't any competition in the OS/2 market! Now is the time to innovate, not after someone comes in and blows WebEx out of the water.

So this is what I want. I want WebExplorer's "forms" handling fixed; they just don't work properly in some cases.

I want the "mail" handling fixed so it doesn't crash occasionally (or for some people, constantly) when sending mail.

I want a real hot list manager. Sure there are add-ons available now that address this flaw, but this seems like the most trivial of all the problems with WebExplorer. Surely it doesn't take the entire OS/2 development team to add a small hierarchical menuing system. DeScribe and FileBar manage to allow very configurable menus that can be moved around, changed and generally manipulated in every way. Why can't WebEx?

This one little feature would make my job as editor infinitely easier. Even users who don't have to routinely check a lot of different web sites, probably do. Given the vastness of the WWW, a well organized hot list is essential. If the WebEx team can't figure out how to do it, just stick 5 items on the menu bar and call them "Hot List A", "Hot List B". . . Anything would be an improvement.

And I want frames. I know they're not an HTML standard. I don't care. I'm not about to start using Netscape under OS/2 or creating these pages to suit Netscape (unless they remove their heads from wherever they are and make a native OS/2 browser), but I just can't wait. I feel like a poor kid standing outside a toy store window. These things are that great!

So c'mon WebEx team, put your heads together with Netscape, license the code, or do whatever you have to. Include frames and then pressure CERN to adopt them. Just do it now!

By the way, if you haven't seen frames yet, I won't do free advertising for Netscape. Suffice it to say they allow a much more useful layout of WWW sites (for example, an on-line magazine).

I'm not even going to mention Java and VRML. At least those are being addressed--how promptly remains to be seen.

Anyway, enough ranting. Let's get these abilities into WebExplorer now and then start thinking about what the next innovations will be, instead of waiting for someone else to do it and then taking 6 months to catch up. If IBM's application developers don't take these aggressive steps, OS/2 will continue to be the perpetual also-ran to whatever flavour OS Microsoft happens to be selling this year.

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