Is IE 5.0 a Significant Upgrade? What's New Jim Fox
Fixed Layout Tables A number of changes have been incorporated into IE 5.0 to increase performance and stability. One such improvement is the TABLE performance improvements. Internet Explorer now has support for Fixed Layout Tables. This renders tables much faster. The Fixed Layout Tables allow Internet Explorer to display the table without calculating the size of the cells. Table data can now be displayed on the page even while the rest of the table is still loading. In many cases, using Fixed Layout Tables increases performance by as much as two orders of magnitude (from 100 seconds to 1 second)! In addition, Fixed Layout Tables can be progressively rendered; the browser will show each table row as it downloads. With regular tables, the entire table must be loaded before any of it shows.
Checking Expiration Dates Another improvement is with the HTTP-Expires header on both pages and images. Internet Explorer will no longer automatically check the network first when an object from the cache has not yet expired. Network traffic will be greatly reduced and performance improved for pages that use a large number of images that tend not to go stale. Previously, all objects were always checked for staleness.
Dynamic Relative/Absolute Positioning Some positioning limitations in IE 4.0 have been addressed. Drag and Drop functionality is now much easier. Every HTML element can now be placed on a page with Relative Positioning but then can revert to Absolute Positioning on the fly!
Dynamic Properties Now any property on a page can be defined as a function of any other property. For example, the font size of a section of text can be set to 20% of the width of a page. The font size will change dynamically if the page is resized, without refreshing the page from the server!
