Actually, Apple may not have gone far enough in protecting users from powerful Internet features. And users might not know that fiddling with Network Utility's port scanning features can get them in trouble with a network administrator. OS X also includes support for some newer Internet standards, like WebDAV for read-write access to Web file servers, PPPoE for connecting to DSL providers, and SLP for configuring network settings. Internet support in OS X has two glaring weak spots. One is documentation.
Some features are hard to find, and others are presented without explanation.
Something as simple as a mild technical glossary in the online help would go a long way toward making OS X more usable. Users can run many Internet applications in the surprisingly fast Classic emulator, but there's currently not one high-quality Web browser that runs as a native OS X application. The beta of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 that ships with the OS still has its share of bugs and limitations, as does Omni Group's newly released OmniWeb 4.0 browser. The browser situation may improve over the next few weeks or months as Microsoft and Omni Group refine their code and other vendors, like Mozilla , Opera Software , and iCab , execute their plans for OS X browsers. It could be some time, though, before OS X replacements are available for all the ISP dialers, multimedia players, instant messaging clients, and other software Mac Internet users are accustomed to.