Get a load of this. I try to use the festering bowl of pus that is Internet Explorer 5 as little as possible but keep it around for those few websites that require Internet Explorer. However, I support thousands of users who do use IE5 regularly. Most of them simply don't know any better and continue to use IE5 installed on their systems despite the superior alternatives that exist. I even install these alternatives on their machines, but like Pavlov's dogs, they are conditioned to repeat their behavior. Ah, but I digress.A few years ago, Microsoft started making http://www.msn.com the default homepage for their installations of Internet Explorer 5. I didn't personally like the move but at least I knew how to change my default homepage. The majority of my users do not know how to do this and so end up, just as Microsoft planned, staring at msn.com every time they launch their browsers.
Now, this is relatively harmless behavior until you take into account a change that Microsoft made either late last week or sometime this weekend. They've made a change to http://www.msn.com that crashes Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh. Yup, that's right...Microsoft has changed the coding on the default homepage for their IE5 browser on the Mac that crashes the very browser in question. And it gets worse. Since the only easy way to change the default homepage in IE5 is to do it in the browser itself (in the Preferences) and the browser is crashing with a spinning beachball of death (SBOD) when you launch it, there's now a classic Catch-22. How can users change the homepage to something else if you have to do it in the browser, but the browser crashes loading the page?
Fortunately, there is a way around this. You can hit the Command and period keys immediately after launching IE5 to stop the page from loading and therefore stop the browser from locking up. Then you can go to the Internet Explorer menu and select Preferences. Click on "browser display" in the list and you'll be able to change IE5's default homepage to something other than msn.com.
I've tested this on Macs running Mac OS X versions 10.2.8, 10.3.9, and 10.4.3. Internet Explorer 5 on all of them behaves exactly the same way, crashing trying to load the msn.com homepage. Discontinued browser or not, I feel it's inexcusable for Microsoft to change their browser's default homepage without testing it against all the latest versions of their own browser for each platform. Congratulations Microsoft for reaching a new level of cluelessness I've never seen before. Way to go.
Updates:
11-01-05, 8:40am: Microsoft has changed msn.com to fix this problem.
11-01-05, 1:53pm: Now msn.com is crashing IE5 again.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
10-31-2005 @ 9:41PM
olivier said...
and how are they gonna find out on this blog that they have to press Command and period if they can't open their browser? ;)
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10-31-2005 @ 9:51PM
Damien Barrett said...
Yup, ESC works also. But then you've never had to help my users, some of whom can't find the ESC key. I'm not kidding.
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10-31-2005 @ 10:00PM
scp said...
Low-tech solution: Wouldn't it be easier to unplug/disable the network connection and launch IE?
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10-31-2005 @ 10:00PM
Heather said...
Or, tell folks to unplug their network cable and not let the browser go anywhere (or their telco line for the modem). When the browser times out, THEN change the homepage.
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10-31-2005 @ 10:03PM
Mark said...
#2 - Command-period is a very standard combo for canceling anything on a Mac. It works most places Esc does. Not advertised like it used to be (in every print status dialog box, e.g.), but still works.
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10-31-2005 @ 10:08PM
Damien Barrett said...
You guys all offer good points but forget that in my environment (and I'd be willing to bet in a LOT of environments), users aren't allowed to unplug cables. Nor do I think the majority of users out there know enough to unplug the ethernet cable. Seriously, just because you guys know this stuff doesn't mean the average user does. For the vast majority of users, computers are still devices that work by magic. Spend some time with the herd, you'll know what I mean.
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10-31-2005 @ 10:49PM
EJ said...
This is hardly cluelessnes, and more-likely-than-not, was intentional. Think about it, if your an average Computer user with no real knowledge of the tech world, and every time you opened your browser on a a Mac(the most common task on most any computer), would you ever by that type of computer again. I think not, that same theory is why I bought a mac ;)
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10-31-2005 @ 10:54PM
Domoarigato said...
Dont forget, for the folks with wireless connection you can just turn off Airport then open the hated browser and watch it whiff.
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10-31-2005 @ 11:29PM
JP said...
Yep, worked like a charm. I fired up Internet Explorer (iBook G4 10.4.3) and it started going but then froze up promptly.
*rolls eyes*
How lame is that???
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10-31-2005 @ 11:38PM
David Chartier said...
What is it with M$ and over-complicating shortcuts too? I remember back in the days of owning a PC and WMP 9 that play was ctrl-p. Not space - as with every other media-related application under the sun. CTRL-P.
Could esc - like every other browser - have done the trick?
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10-31-2005 @ 11:40PM
Simon said...
This is a brillian t move by Microsoft. Finally all those stubborn IE5 users will be forced to upgrade to a modern browser IE really has supplanted Netscape: they've now become a huge pain in the ass like NS was!
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11-01-2005 @ 12:09AM
Robert Knight said...
So, as a web developer, I'm now wondering:
Is Microsoft using standards-compliant code on MSN's homepage?
That would mean that IE5 was so pathetically non-compliant, it can't handle good code, shame on Microsoft.
OR OR OR
Have they put janky, non-compliant code on their MSN page that ends up breaking a browser.
My money is on a bit of both. Anyone who goes to a page on myspace.com knows about Microsoft's crappy product (WMP) breaking browsers.
Surprisingly, there are only 8 errors on the MSN homepage:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.msn.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=XHTML+1.0+Strict
Indicating IE5 was a piss-poor product from the start. Good job, M$
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11-01-2005 @ 12:24AM
Logan said...
The sad part is that the changes that are needed to make the code validate are so little: removing a few attributes, changing "A" to "a"...
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11-01-2005 @ 12:29AM
wry cooter said...
How difficult is it to open Explorer without a connection to the internet? That seems like it would be one OBVIOUS way to change the home page preferences without loading msn.com. Really, is it that hard to NOT be connected to the internet for a moment?
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11-01-2005 @ 1:56AM
Caleb Dewberry said...
holy crap!!! you mean something from Microsoft actually DOESNT WORK!!!??!?!?!?!? wtf is up with that? lol that is so weird that it doesnt work. So now mac users will use another browser like firefox and like fall in love with it, and then when they are forced to use a windows pc, they will want to use firefox, which will further decrease IE's popularity, or something like that....
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11-01-2005 @ 2:29AM
Twist said...
Do the world a favor and delete this post so people won't know what the problem is and will stop using IE5 for Mac. I have considered deleting it right after replacing it's Dock icon with one for Safari with the IE icon applied for all the Mac's at my college but then they decided to lock the Dock so that students couldn't modify it anymore.
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11-01-2005 @ 2:48AM
Xenedar said...
Microsoft are b@st@rds with the default homepage too. It's encoded into Apple's internet preferences file (something like com.apple.internetconfig.plist), and it's stored per-user AND per-machine (possibly just per-user).
I could never find a way to pre-load my users' IE with our intranet homepage - IE simply refused, because of this encoding thing. So now, the first time a user ever logs into one of our Macs, the login script installs a specially configured com.apple.internetconfig.plist which is set to not load any page on startup. Maybe I can't stop IE from using msn.com as a homepage, but I can stop IE from loading anything period.
To Damien Barrett: don't just install other browsers - delete IE while you're there. Or maybe write an AppleScript called "Internet Explorer" with the "e" icon on it, which loads Safari or Firefox instead. I fully intend to delete IE from every one of my users' machines ASAP. Unfortunately, a couple of our databases "require" it, which I think means the company couldn't be bothered testing anything newer than 4 years old, and is assuming IE works based on it having the same name as the Windows browser. The second these databases are certified for Safari or a Mozilla derivative, I'm pulling IE immediately (and I can do so to every machine in one hit, due to our software deployment system, which is nifty...).
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11-01-2005 @ 3:50AM
Mojo said...
It didn't crash when i tried it. 10.3.9, iBook G3 800Mhz.
I wonder what version of IE5 you guys seeing this behavior are using?
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11-01-2005 @ 4:39AM
Seth van der Meer said...
hm, it did not crash on my Pbook, 1.5 ghz, 2gb, 10.4.3. But that doesn't really matter. MSN should upgrade all together to a new browser, since many of the IE only sites still don't work with IE 5 on the mac...
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11-01-2005 @ 5:07AM
Nick said...
Works fine here too. Pb 1.25 Mac OSX 10.4.3
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