The External View panel allows you to bring up all the data about a region that you are viewing from either the UCSD server or ENSEMBL. To use ENSEMBL you must have a fairly zoomed in picture (>100,000bp) and it must be a species that ENSEMBL curates. A smaller region or specific gene may return more data due to more details being available.
You can NOT interact with this view, but you can get interesting details about a gene/region. The information that is brought can include mapped ESTs, SNPs, cross species comparisons, repeated sequence data, as well as basic gene annotations. As a caution, the larger the region in the inquiry, the slower it will be to load the information. Every time you move to a new area, you will need to click the update button.
An example of what you will get back is below; Picture 1 is the UCSD server for the cow genes shown. The second picture is ENSEMBL for the mouse gene Farsb