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[ Go to "Turbo Charge Your Browser" ]
Cover Story
-- by Lenny Bailes
Traveling Software's WebEx is a product in transition. Version 1.0 was shipping when this review was written, but a successor should be available by the time you read this. WebEx 1.0 acts as a specially programmed proxy server to your Web browser. After you launch the WebEx Server, your browser appears with a set of instructions and control buttons directly embedded in an HTML page. The control buttons let you set options for downloading and viewing Web pages. You can customize download settings to follow unlimited link levels (up to nine internal link levels are outlined in the program) at a domain, restricting the search exclusively to the directory of the target page, to the target directory plus all subdirectories or to the entire site domain. You can also define unlimited link levels of information external to the domain. WebEx provides fine control over which components of a page to grab. You can include--or exclude--embedded inline text, inline images, and embedded audio and embedded video files. You can also choose to include jump references that download these specific file types. WebEx reliably grabs server-side image maps, something none of the other tested products can manage. You can set maximum limits on the storage space allocated to a site, or on the number of individual components. WebEx's scheduling options let you set hourly, daily-at-periodic times, weekly, or specific date-and-time updates. In our tests with Netscape 3.0, WebEx 1.0 successfully downloaded and displayed embedded QuickTime movies as well as class 1 JavaScript graphics. Performance with Shockwave was erratic. We were unable to log into a conferencing site because this version of WebEx screens out the browser's cookie support. WebEx 2.0, which we sneaked a peek at, moves to a browser-independent model similar to DataViz's Web Buddy. A taskbar at the top of the screen provides control of administrative functions for downloading and bookmarking pages. Traveling Software says the new version can process embedded multimedia and class 1 Java code. Other WebEx 2.0 enhancements include the ability to share downloaded sites over a LAN and the export of directory mirror images of sites to local or network drives. Version 2.0 also includes sophisticated support for querying search directories.
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