« Fun with macro photography
Sprint PCS Web site is horrible »

Pet peeve of the day

Today’s Pet Peeve is software — almost exclusively from Microsoft — that is hard-coded to use a certain Web browser (Internet Explorer), ignoring the user’s preferred default browser. The problem children today are MSN Messenger, MSN Desktop Search, and the Windows XP Help system. Click on almost any hyperlink in these apps and the link will open in IE no matter what browser is selected as your default. Worse, the behavior is wildly inconsistent. The Hotmail and ad banner links in MSN Messenger use IE, but clicking a URL in someone’s instant message will open in the system default browser. Aaaaargh! :mad: Clicking a URL in the search results in MSN Desktop Search will open the link in IE. Why do you do this, Microsoft?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 16:45 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Pet peeve of the day”

  1. Dave says:
    2005-09-07 at 16:57

    Tell me about it. I fixed the problem, though…

    http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-0ZFmUbk1erC6prHGUJbW_UclZ3O1Sw–?p=122

  2. Dave says:
    2005-09-07 at 16:59

    http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-0ZFmUbk1erC6prHGUJbW_UclZ3O1Sw–?p=122

    For some reason the link was broken. The two dashes before the ? were replaced by an N dash. Trying again.

  3. Dave says:
    2005-09-07 at 17:00

    Same problem. You blog is trying to be too smart about two dashes!

  4. Dave Beauvais says:
    2005-09-07 at 18:10

    Thanks for the comment and lending your support to my cause. ;) About the URL problem… I guess two consecutive hyphens are not common in a URL. I wonder if you put the link in like this if it works properly…

    Edit: Yes, it would appear that works. Would you mind if I edit your original post so the link works?

Leave a Reply