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On The Horizon

by Barry Gerber

In addition to the six products we reviewed, we tested two beta products, each of which will have a significant impact on the market when they finally ship. InternetWorks Lite from NaviSoft will be the browser for the America Online information service. It sports one of the best browser user interfaces around. Spyglass' Enhanced Mosaic will be repackaged and offered by a number of vendors including Microsoft, SPRY, Ventana, and O'Reilly and Associates, creators of the Global Network Navigator WWW site. Enhanced Mosaic offers security functions that compete with those in Netscape Communications' Netscape. According to the vendors, both products were scheduled for availability by the end of the first quarter of this year.

We include feature information for these two products, for informational purposes only. You can use them as a barometer of how they might have fared in our review. In our discussion of these two products we beta test, problems are not covered. The vendors assured us that these would be fixed in the release version of each product.

InternetWorks Lite, NaviSoft

InternetWorks, now a part of America Online has a very good graphical user interface (GUI), challenged only by that of Frontier's WinTapestry. The upper part of the interface window makes it easy to select most functions and services including built-in mail, UseNet news and Internet Yellow Pages access.

The small icons below the Reload, Stop, Print and Find buttons allow for very easy access to WorldWide Web, gopher, ftp, UseNet news and mail. Clicking on one brings up the hotli st for that particular service. The drop-down menu next to these icons lists options for sites providing the services and TO: address options for mail.

The Microsoft Excel-like tabs near the bottom of the window present the standard Mosaic "history" navigator in a much more user-friendly format. Tabs can be selected with the mouse or by activating the Up-and-Down buttons near the top of the menu. Clicking on the Card Catalog tab brings up a good index card-like display of the history. As with tabs, clicking on any card moves to that point.

Moving through a history is a pleasure with excellent Web page caching. Performance is further enhanced by displaying document text as soon as it is available along with HyperText active place holders for each graphic image while it is being downloaded.

Unlike other products tested, InternetWorks is multithreaded, meaning that multiple activities can take place simultaneously. Thus, for example, the program can download two or more documents at once while sending and receiving e-mail. Sometimes, however, we found this to be a hindrance, as when the program continued downloading documents earlier in our navigation history, even though we had already used what was in them to move on. This tended to slow downloads of current documents.

Like Spyglass' Enhanced Mosaic, InternetWorks prints Web server information and a page number on each page. Unlike the latter product, however, it does not print date and time information. Another good print feature is its paper-saving two-column output. Where other products required two, three and even four pages to print, InternetWorks printed on a single page.

Enhanced Mosaic 2.0, Spyglass

Spyglass was one of many companies that licensed Mosaic from NCSA. That license bought Spyglass the right to modify the product as it saw fit. While there are similarities on the outside, a good deal has changed, and for the better, on the inside.

Enhanced Mosaic is stable, even in its beta test incarnation. Unlike NCSA Mosa ic, there were no crashes or losses of information as we minimized and maximized the Enhanced Mosaic window.

We absolutely loved the way the product does printouts. A header includes the WWW site name and page number in x of y (1 of 3, for example) format. A footer gives date and time of printing information.

However, these additions are nothing compared to the way Enhanced Mosaic handles authentication and encryption security. The product starts with secure HTTP, from RSA Data Security spin-off Terisa Systems. This system is more likely to become a standard than Netscape Communication's SSL. Secure HTTP allows Spyglass to add two forms of authentication and encryption to Enhanced Mosaic. In addition, the product includes FirstVirtual Holdings' Internet Payment System. The Internet Payment System is a kind of virtual credit card for the Information SuperHighway. If an Internet vendor displays the First Virtual logo, you can buy a product or service using the Internet Payment System.

There were no fancy WWW navigation capabilities in the beta version of Enhanced Mosaic. However, we expect that those who license the program for repackaging--O'Reilly and Associates, and Microsoft, for example--will add their own live on-line navigation tools.