Microsoft considered harmful (as if we needed more proof)
It’s a long time since I’ve used Internet Explorer for anything other than browser-compatibility testing, so I’ve never bothered to change its default home page setting to something more useful than http://msn.com. In any case, it’s kind of interesting to see that parallel Micro$oft universe flash by while I’m on my way to wherever it is that I actually want to go today. Well, I had a bit of a chuckle a while back when I fired up IE to do some of the aforesaid testing and was greeted with a message that told me “If you are using Internet Explorer for Mac, we recommend that you use another browser to have an optimal experience of MSN.”
Now, just to put you in the picture, I’m a Mac user, and I’m talking about IE 5.2.3, which is the “latest” version of the browser for my platform. Many of you will be aware that IE Mac development ceased back in 2003.
Anyway, the message didn’t bother me too much, as I couldn’t imagine any reason I might actually want to have an optimal experience of MSN, but I did make a mental note to come back and blog the experience as a classic example of bizarre Microsoft corporate behaviour.
But when I went back to the site tonight to take a screen capture to add to my blog post, things turned nasty. Now msn.com not only doesn’t “support” the latest Mac version of IE, it actually causes it to hang. There’s something evil in that page that actually breaks Explorer.
Since msn.com automatically loads every time I launch the app, the browser is effectively disabled until I fix it. I think there’s something deliciously perverse about Microsoft’s own site rendered their own browser inoperable.
Of course it’s easy to fix this problem if you’re technically canny — I just dragged a handy jpeg file from my desktop onto the IE icon in the dock, so that it would launch without going to msn, then changed the homepage setting in the preferences, but I doubt that many of the users who rely on IE/Mac would be the sort of users who would think of something like that.
For them it’s just another example of “the web is broken“.
PS. Another side-effect of this piece of monumentally bad web design is that the site’s listing on Google has been munged. As noted on CNet’s Apple News Blog, Scott Ard notes that a Google search for “msn explorer mac” returns the following:
