MS Internet Explorer 8 is released… with bugs.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/

So the other day I received an email notifying me that MS IE8 had been released which prompted me to download and install it… I like to live my life dangerously, what can I say… Anyway, after it finished installing, I started it up and much to my dismay ran into a blatant bug which has forced me to lean on FireFox a little more than usual! SURPRISE! I couldn’t for the life of me believe that this was something that already needed a service pack, but I should’ve known better, right? Good God, what is up with that? C’mon Microsoft, you’re better than this, or well, maybe you’re not these days (Vista getting retired, already headed to Windows7? Geez)…

So what was such an obvious problem that prevents me from even caring about anything else offered with this new release? Links that are set to open in a new window simply REFUSE to fucking work!!! My IE8 upgrade from 7 broke the most basic fucking feature that a browser oughtta be capable of handling at the bare minimum!!! I kid you NOT! Now, I don’t mean all links, I mean if the link’s target attribute has been set to “_blank” to open a whole new window, it will NOT work, but regular links limited to the current window will. How troublesome is this? In those cases, I have to right click that link, copy the shortcut, tab over to the new tab, paste link, hit enter, continue… Given the day to day things that I do, this happens more than enough times for it to be a serious inconvenience…

Oh yes, I almost forgot: on top of ALL this, multiple zombie instances of the executable can remain running in the background after thinking you’ve closed it down, draining your memory and CPU time as well. In the time I was bitching to a friend mjmmx over IM, my HDD started getting busy for no apparent reason, so I ran task manager and saw about eight IE8 instances (yes, eight) and one of them was taking 100MB, the other 68MB, the other 50MB, 20MB, 11MB, etc.

So what to do? My default browser has always been IE; that’s just always been the case for numerous reasons involving one of taste, preference, working professionally way back with certain technologies such as ActiveX which was IE-specific in its early years, etc. Since it has been my default browser, it’s got all my favorites/bookmarks the way I like ’em, so importing and reordering them with Firefox or Google Chrome would be a bit of a pain… I’m sure if I look hard enough I’ll find some kind of resolution to my original problem, but if it requires waiting for a service pack, I guess I’m gonna have to parts ways with IE8 for a while, that is, unless I can uninstall the damn thing and go back to IE7.

PC Specs (was manufactured ~June of ’08, purchased for a mere $399 on Sept. 28 – pretty damn new):

Model:
MEDION® AKOYA® E5300 D MULTIMEDIA PC
OS:
Windows Vista® Home Premium (32-bit) Service Pack 1
CPU:
AMD Phenom™ X3 8450 Triple-Core Processor 64-bit
Memory:
3072 MB DDR2 SDRAM Memory with 667 MHz, 64-bits, Dual Channel Memory
Video:
ATI Radeon™ HD3450 Graphics Card with 256 MB, DVI-I, D-Sub VGA and TV out
Storage:
640 GB Hard Disk Drive S-ATA 300 Interface, superfast 7200 rpm, 16 MB Cache

UPDATE: I FOUND A FIX EVEN THOUGH THE GUY THAT REPORTED IT WAS DOUBTFUL THAT IT WORKS.

1) Open a Command Prompt window as Administrator
2) Run:       regsvr32 /u actxprxy.dll
3) Then run:  regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

That fixed the problem with links not opening new windows or tabs! Yay! I dunno if this will have an effect on the zombie processes problem, but I’ll find out soon enough! Apparently, that DLL somehow is being improperly registered because if it’s not registered at all, IE8 will not even start up. So unregistering and reregistering as Administrator does the trick! *Sigh* Better luck next time, eh Microsoft? There’s always a next time…

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