The Gimcrack Miscellany

Microsoft’s Own Products Don’t Work With IE

Posted on 19. Dec, 2007 by The Gimcracker in Fail

There’s this new technology called Silverlight from Microsoft, which basically exists to support fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers. When I installed it in my browser, IE at the time, nothing happened. I was supposed to be seeing this shiny, spinning carousel of Microsoft downloads seen over there →.

I tried installing it within IE7 but nothing happened. I tried again – still nothing. Then I opened Firefox, and let me tell you I had it installed in no time. Basically a browser restart was required, but only Firefox was kind enough to let me know what was going on.

That is not the most troubling part, however. At least it still worked in IE – that is, after I restarted the browser. The reason I was even at this website was to install a program called Visual Web Developer 2008, which is a Microsoft product. I tried to download and install it (this is after I’ve restarted my IE browser and everything’s kosher, mind you) and I only got as far as the screen shows down there ↓.

I thought to myself, maybe it just needs another restart. Nope, it just goes in circles and never installs it. So I switch back to my friend Firefox again and try the same method. Once again it let me know exactly what was going on the whole time. “Do you want to save the file?”. Sure. “Here it is downloaded to your computer. Do you want to open this file?” Yes I do. “Ok, look, now it’s installing. Anything else is your OS’s fault. I’m going back to the Intarwebz, see you in a bit.” Ok buddy, ttyl.

Bottom line is, IE7 was not capable of downloading a simple file from Microsoft’s download page, but Firefox did it painlessly. I’m not just complaining about the evil corporation Microsoft for no reason like a lot of people out there. If you know me, you know I have nothing against them and the majority of products I use on a day to day basis were made by them. But this was truly frustrating and I wanted to vent about it before my anger subsided.