I noticed this evening that a lot of the sites I have in my feed reader, like Hot Air and Townhall’s main blog (as well as the user blogs, including my little corner hole in the wall) have suddenly popped up with “Unable to load site – Operation Aborted” errors. That’s very annoying as both my feed readers use the IE API to open up websites that offer limited feeds. After a bit of searching, I found out that Microsoft threw up Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.
There’s some good news and some bad news:
– It gets rid of the “Operation Aborted” errors that have plagued the last few versions of IE.
– A LOT of sites are going to look ugly in IE8. A very-quick example is Haloscan; the Gravatars pop outside the pop-up box.
– However, there’s good news; we can choose to emulate IE7’s look.
Normally, I wouldn’t recommend a beta. However, if you do run into the “Operation Aborted” problem and cannot for whatever reason completely supplant IE with Firefox, get it and activate the IE7 emulation.
Revisions/extensions (7:42 am 8/2/2008) – The Lizards tracked the trigger of Microsoft’s IE 5.5-7 (inclusive) fuck-up to a fuck-up by Sitemeter. Boy am I glad I dumped those bastiches.
R&E part 2 (10:14 am 8/2/2008) – IE8(B1) doesn’t quite squash the underlying bug, as Sitemeter’s site doesn’t render properly due to it. It does, however, ignore it if a third-party site causes the glitch.
USE FIREFOX!
Cultist.
Dave, did you pay attention to what I said about why I needed to grab IE8? It’s a function of my feed readers. Give me a feed reader that will render pages with Firefox’s API within the reader so I don’t have to keep on opening browser windows to read posts and I’ll be glad to give the big FUCK YOU to Microsoft.
So which IS it–IE7 or Sitemeter?
IOW, after your IE8 upgrade/IE7 emulation, did the damn sites open?
In order:
– Both. An apparent change in Sitemeter’s Javascript is triggering a pre-existing bug in IE7 (and IE6, and IE5.5).
– They open like a dream in IE8. As I said, there are some beta bugs left in IE8B1.