Internet Explorer: A mind of its own

I feel like I need a new category for whining specifically about stupid Microsoft error messages. Before you say, "Hey, it's not just Microsoft products that generate stupid error messages" let me say that while in theory I agree with you, in practice I am sitting in front of Linux and Apple machines all day long and they never aggravate or slap me in the face with this stuff the way that Microsoft-driven PCs can.

Today I am thrilled to present you with the infamous "Internet Explorer cannot display this page. Operation Aborted." message. Oh really? "Can't?" Or "Won't?"

The awesome FAIL that this incorporates in this particular instance is that Internet Explorer is actually already displaying the page when I get the error. I can see what it tells me it can't display, right behind the error box. Only after I click "Okay" does the page disappear, making good on the promised error, even though it is obviously a matter of preference rather than incapacity when it comes to actually showing the HTML that has been delivered.

Firefox and Safari, of course, both show the page without complaint and exactly as it should be rendered.

This just started happening randomly on a test machine, only on certain parts of certain sites. No patches or other changes had been made at the machine since it worked correctly. A little digging unearthed this mea culpa from Microsoft; it appears to usually have to do with certain JavaScript functions in a page. This is cold comfort if you are just a user, of course. The company has eliminated the pointless "feature" from IE 8, so you could upgrade I suppose if you really had to use IE. The only purpose for which we need it is testing, and it's pointless to test a version that is not in use for your client, so that's not an option here. Frankly, I am so sick of the pathetic "Hey, it's fixed in our next version!" song and dance from the IE team that I wouldn't get back on that carousel anyway.

Their pushback of these issues onto developers is maddening as well. IE is a steaming pile of... well, let's just say that it's not a good browser to develop for. These sorts of random, unreproducible but legitimate bugs are a soul-sucking detour from the path to productivity. It must require the patience of Job to avoid shaking your users physically and screaming at them "Download Firefox instead, you boobs!"

In this case, fortunately, we are working in a VMWare image, so it was a simple matter to roll back to a version from a few days ago that did not exhibit the issue. Why it didn't, I don't know; spending time trying to figure out why would probably just be an expensive and pointless time-suck given the unpredictability of the issue occuring.