Did Microsoft Screw Up Internet Explorer 8?

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All of a sudden my web browsers could not load pages properly. This started happening last week and some weird objects were listed as damaged in the “C:\Windows\Downloaded Program Files” directory. I thought I had been hit by a virus and decided to bite the bullet and do a clean install of all my programs on Christmas Day. Reinstalling Windows Vista and Microsoft Office was easy enough, it was downloading all the updates and waiting for them to install that was painful. After 6-7 hours of exquisite torture, the reinstallation was finally complete. Happily I started to watch my videos (I watch China made TV serials from sites like Sohu.com) but it was not long before the same problems started to manifest again. Adobe Flash would not work properly and system felt sluggish.

Embittered and chagrined, I started to suspect that maybe the virus was hiding out in the system restore partition of my Dell laptop computer. If so, it would be necessary to reinstall everything again, except that this time I would break the disk partition and format the hard disk as a single drive. All of Sunday was spent doing this but I consoled myself that it was time well spent as my system would be clean and I would then be more productive.

Lo and behold, when finally everything was set in place I found that Internet Explorer 8 still would not load the pages completely. Pictures were selectively and randomly not displayed and some websites would not load at all. Wrongplanet.net now actually looks different from when I last viewed it a few days ago before my computer started to act up. Nor is the problem limited to Internet Explorer 8, Firefox does not display the pages correctly either. Although to Mozilla’s credit, at least Firefox displays Microsoft’s website properly whereas using Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft’s homepage is virtually unusable.

Just a few hours ago Microsoft sent out an important XML and Jscript patch which leads me to wonder if they are the cause of all my problems. I have another computer that is running Vista that too is mysteriously experiencing problems displaying web pages but did not exhibit any problems before. Am I alone in having this problem or does anyone else have the same problem?

Most likely, we are talking about the king of planned obsolescence. Although everyone is in on that game.

Your problem is that you're using Internet Explorer. Switch to Mozilla's Firefox and see if you aren't much more satisfied.

Everytime Microsoft 'fixes' one thing, they screw up three others in the process. They've 'upgraded and improved' Windows Media Player ten times now and it's even more cheesier and crappy than it's ever been. It's so pathetic to watch their people try to emulate iTunes.

And fail.

Repeatedly.

I've got IE8 (i. e. hate) on my computer; very rarely use it. Just too clunky and un-configurable. Firefox is my browser of choice.

Media Player is much worse. The interface is seriously crap ... and buggy too. And why does it take 30 seconds to open? Why does it shutdown if I try to open an mp3 file too quickly? Why does it say it has crashed when I close it and say it wants to send a report to Microsoft? Why is it so damn unfriendly to do anything? When I want to play a DVD movie why does it play the most recent mp3 instead?

Um... IE8? That won't do. To display web pages, you're going to need to use a web browser.

I rather browse the internet on Lynx than use IE8.

I actually like the IE8 interface as it is less cluttered than Firefox’s. Plus I have thousands of documents (SEC financial filings and the like) which were downloaded from the web and saved in MHT format that can only be read using Internet Explorer. Converting these documents into some other format like PDF would be a real pain even if I figured out a way to do it in batches.

My guess is that Microsoft introduced a patch that interferes with how Java Script works. Pictures not displaying is not the real problem, when a link is clicked on IE8 sometimes will not display the page and claim that there was a problem with the connection. There is nothing wrong with my internet connection.

I am not alone with this problem. When I googled the damaged objects, it appears that others have experienced similar problems. Everyone runs HijackThis and MalwareThat and what not but there does not appear to be any resolution. What if the malware is Vista and IE8?

If you want uncluttered, try Chrome.


Now you've figured it out!

Try Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Alternatively you can try using telnet. Telnet is a great new feature included in Windows 95, 98, ME, 2K, and XP. Sadly it is not available in Vista or 7, and cannot load web pages. Still better than IE!

yup, telnet is capable (if a bit primitive), but most Linux training I've seen recommends disabling it soonest...

One of my reasons for using Firefox is that it is less cluttered than IE8! With Firefox I've customised the toolbar down to a single row. The minimum possible with IE8 is two rows.

Alright, I admit that the reason I use IE8 is because I do not want to learn how to operate new technologies. When I started fiddling with computers the big decision was between MS-DOS versus PC-DOS. The rapid changes in technology in the last 25 years or so have pretty much exhausted my desire to learn something new. I could probably configure the some other browser (I do have Firefox installed) so that the clutter is eliminated, but the thought of making the move just tires me out.

Using Microsoft’s MHT file format to store web pages makes sense to me because I do not see Microsoft disappearing the way that Netscape is now all but forgotten. Hopefully this means that I can still access my work years later when I need to. But from the way Microsoft appears to be jamming its own software, that hope has definitely dimmed somewhat. Still, the investment has been made and there is no way back without swallowing a large measure of pain.

Telnet? That is something from the UNIX shell days. Unless you are a hacker or a hacker wannabe seeking to gain unlawful entry into other people’s computer system, you probably would not have even heard of telnet. It is one of those primitive protocols that all computers retain but is essentially a useless vestige.

I do very simple things with my computer. The financial filings I examine are either in HTML, PDF or occasionally in TIFF format. My days are spent working on an Excel dataset that contains my notations on the financial information I glean. The only reason I needed to buy a new computer a year and a half ago was because the old Pentium 4 laptop would not run my VBA macros efficiently anymore. And I do enjoy watching videos from the internet. So my lament is why then is it so difficult to have the system work the way it needs to?

It does not need to be so hard. As other people have said, the fact that IE8 does not work when it is the one piece of software from Microsoft that really should is incredibly stupid. How can a company that spends so much money on software development get it so wrong?

oh, gawd, Telnet. I cut my Internet teeth on Telnet chatters. I used to mod back in the wild and woolly when a woman (read actual) woman on the Internet was catnip to the overwhelming majority of men and boys on Telnet. Lintilla a BBS from Sweden had chat rooms in English. I got my job at Gateway 2000 in North Sioux City, South Dakota USA from that BBS. Got there just in time to support the Pentium with Windows 95.

those were the days . . .

Merle

True...I actually used Telnet to log into mainframe printers to test Internet settings. I can't remember the name of the first program I usedl (probably Procomm), but it came on a 5/25" floppy...

People always wondered what the 'B' drive was. . .relics of the past, when a floppy was a floppy. . .