Internet Explorer sucks

After a bit of thought, I have decided that I thoroughly hate Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac. Besides the tendency to 'unexpectedly quit' without warning, it also does not display foreign language characters/fonts correctly (I have all the fonts needed for this; IE just doesn't display them). I'm studying Danish, and much to my disbelief, IE often fails to display the accented letters bolle (Å å), streg (Ø ø) and the a/e ligature (Æ æ), which are included in almost every Latin font in existence. The browser I really liked was Chimera (now Camino) but it developed a fatal bug last year and it refuses to launch. Someone (I think it was Tomas) told me that I could find the answer to my problem on MacFixIt, but I was put off when I found it was a paid service (I'm a teenager with no money). Can someone be nice n' sweet to me and tell me how to fix the bug? I don't think I can stand one more day of Explorer. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

- James

have you tried safari?

Geoff

I would also question the logic of using IE for anything nowadays. If you're running OSX then Safari is definitely the way to go. If you hit a site that it wont render then mozilla will. I have yet to hit anything that the second beta doesn't work with though.

if you cannot launch Chimera, and you can't launch any version of it for the last year then I would guess you have a corrupt preference file that causes all of them to crash. Find your preferences folder and delete that. Might also check to make sure you haven't got a gig of garbage in your bookmarks file or something like that.

If none of that helps at all, please post more info about your machine. OS, hardware etc.

Just a testimonial here.

I've had problems with IE ever since I started using it. A month I tried Mozilla because the advertisements and pop-ups were driving me bugs.

Ah.... Much better. I allow only the ads I want, only the pop-ups I want, only the cookies I want. And it didn't take a long time to learn Mozilla's ways. I still have IE on my start menu - kind of a security thing. But I rarely use it. When I do, I know why I appreciate Mozilla.

Mozilla's tab feature is fantastic.

Follow this path to the stuff that you should probably just delete to get Chimera/Camino to run again ...

(your hard drive)/users/(your login)/Library/Application Support/Chimera/Profiles/default/(some wierd name)/

The "weird name" directory has all the bookmarks, preferences, cookies, etc. files in it.

If it has been a while since you could use those browsers there may be no reason to try to save any of that. If that's the case, I'd just delete the "Chimera" directory and everything below it in the path above, the do a fresh install of Camino 0.7 or later.

Another thing I'd do (I found the need for this the hard way) is to get "Back up user prefs 2.4.1" or later from m-t-software.com,
read the description on the site and in the read_me file that comes with the script, and when your system is running right run the script to back up all your prefs and such. I've had to use it to restore a couple of times (I use my machines HARD). Every now an then, run the backup again so you can be sure of having the latest of everything on hand if something breaks.

(I also run a mirrored drive that is a duplicate of my main HD so that if I have a drive failure I can just restart from the mirror, but that is more complex and expensive than is reasonable for most folks.)

One more thing: Sometimes, if you force quit Chimera/Camino/any program, a "lock" file may be left in the'puter showing that the program and it's resources are already in use and won't let you run another incarnation of it (to prevent over write problems, etc.). Most of the time you can just do a couple of restarts to eliminate this bogus lock file, but sometimes you may have to chase it down and nuke it yourself. Ugly.



-= MICROSOFT FREE ZONE =- <--- That doesn't just mean "I don't do Windows" but means Internet Exploder, uh, Exploiter, er, Explorer, too. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

Here's another little tidbit on MSIE:

"According to this article on Secunia, a new IE exploit was found that crashes almost any version of Internet Explorer past 4.0 with just 5 lines of plain HTML code (no JavaScript, ActiveX, etc.). If you're very brave, you can test/crash your IE by going here." There's also a note on SecurityFocus."

This affects MSIE, MS Outlook and Outlook Express, and a few other things that run on Windows ... I don't know if this affects the Mac OS or OS X versions of MSIE, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

Don't you just love MS? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif



-= MICROSOFT FREE ZONE =-