Number Nine Nightmare

My short personal nightmare is over. I quit Internet Explorer 9 after a day.

Internet Explorer 9 was supposed to faster, swifter, and more dynamic than Internet Explorer 8, but it was actually more difficult to use and impossible to navigate. I should have known something was wrong when the URL field was shorter than my index finger.

I mentioned a Javascript error on Blogger.com. Yes, well, when I tried to publish something on Blogger.com yesterday morning, nothing happened - although I could save something. It took forty-five minutes and a call to Microsoft tech support to discover that Blogger.com was incompatible with IE9 and I had to press my "broken page" icon to correct it. Fine, I thought, This new system won't give us any more trouble.

Oh, foolish, foolish man! When my mother tried to go into her e-mail from work - which is on a private e-mail account - she wasted an hour trying to adapt to IE9 and she had to call one of her coworkers for help. Then last night I returned to Blogger.com, thinking I'd have no more problems. Instead I had more difficulty publishing anything or saving drafts - my original draft of my Peter Falk entry was wiped out entirely.

Then I had a Detroit moment - named for the city in which someone who paid to see Charlie Sheen's stand-up act said, "This is bull**** and I want my money back!" I said to myself, "Internet Explorer 9 is crap and I want Internet Explorer 8 back!" But having already installed IE9, I wondered I could revert to IE8 without cutting myself off from Internet access entirely and having to get someone at Microsoft tech support to re-install IE8 for me.

I could. All I had to do was uninstall Internet Explorer 9 and restart my computer and it would be reconfigured back to Internet Explorer 8. (I found the instructions online.) So I did just that. Now I have the PC and my sanity restored, I have Internet Explorer 8 back, and I'm happy again.

Oh, yeah, Internet Explorer 9 was developed sometime last year but it's still in prototype form. It hasn't been officially released yet, but anyone with Internet Explorer 8 is being encouraged to install Internet Explorer 9 anyway on the pretext of keeping one's computer "updated." (I happen to get plenty of updates that need to be installed.) So, many Web sites, like Blogger.com, aren't compatible with this new browser. And people who try it pretty much don't want it. Like me. And I don't expect to get IE9 when it comes out officially, whenever that is.

Thus endeth my bad #9 dream.

Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé . . . ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé . . . ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé . . ..