Outstanding bugs in Explorer
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshMay 21st, 2003 • 10:30 pm
As much as I would love not HAVING to ever use Internet Explorer again, there are sites on which Safari does not a good job or that don’t even work at all. Sometimes Camino doesn’t work either. So I have to switch back to Explorer for certain things.
When I do, I’m constantly reminded of so many outstanding bugs that get in the way of what you are doing that it’s not even funny. The most obvious one today: clicking on a link is interpreted as control-clicking on the link, and opens the contextual popup menu instead of actually following the link.
It does this with links on web pages, but also with the bookmarks in the Favorites Toolbar. If you try about 10 ten times, eventually you manage to get Explorer to interpret the click properly — but what a pain!
Of course, it’s inconsistent, from system to system, from day to day, and I’m sure that someone at Microsoft is blaming it on a bug in Mac OS X. The bottom-line is that it’s been around for over a year and no one has bothered to fix it. And it’s infuriating!
Explorer also keeps forgetting several preference settings from one session to the next, probably because it doesn’t save preference changes until you actually quit the application. And in Mac OS X the only reason you want to quit an application is because it has frozen. But then you have to do a force quit — and you lose all the changes you might have made to the settings (possibly several days earlier).
It is simply obvious that preference settings should be saved right away. They are not in Microsoft’s applications (Explorer, Word, etc.). If you want a preference setting to stick, your best bet is to make the change, quit the application, and relaunch it. It’s a pain.