August 24th, 2006
IE 7 RC1 - better luck with RC2 guys
Sometimes I don’t know what gets into my head. I saw that the first Release Candidate (RC1) of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP was rolled out today and so of course I ran right out, downloaded and installed it.
Oh, it’s nice enough in a me-too sort of way and it nicely figured out that it should turn off the tabbed browsing being provided by the Windows Live Toolbar for me.
But it breaks FeedDemon which now dutifully crashes every time I click on a link. I came up with a fix - tun off the internal browser (which is of course IE-spawned) and open links in a new Firefox tab instead. Sorry - that’s a deal breaker for me. I hate context switching. I’m going back to IE 6 and will hope they figure out what went wrong before RC 2 rolls around.
I know some of you will say it’s FeedDemon’s problem to solve (and I’m actually optimistic Nick will figure it out and deliver a fix in short order) but i don’t really care. One of the "advantages" of IE’s deep hooks into the system is that Microsoft argues it makes it easy for third party developers to use its rendering engine and other goodies to embed a browser. This could have, should have, been tested more thoroughly.
And yes Virginia… I did file an error report on this (three or four actually).
Update: I heard from Nick Bradbury this morning and have sent him some crash data to see if we can figure out what is going on. What a great response!
Marc Orchant has been building, testing, and sometimes breaking hardware and software for 25 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
