IE9: Beware

[LER]

We use PGP encryption at work, and apparently the IE9 update (pushed from Windows Update last night as "important") breaks it.

Our support folks had to re-image my ThinkPad.

Just fair warning......

 

[SatinKzo]

hmm. no problems on my end with PGP (or TrueCrypt for that matter) Only issue I have had with IE9 is it changed my shortcut in my taskbar to the 64bit edition of IE for some reason. Then some of the web controls on some pages stopped working. Took me a little bit of time to figure that one out.

 

[LER]

Interesting. I wonder what's special about mine then.

 

[JamesJ]

it stopped our security camera remote viewing due to it being incompatible...other then that I havent seen too much...I enjoy how they do favorites!

 

[SatinKzo]

Interesting. I wonder what's special about mine then.

Dunno, but if it makes you feel better, IE8 when I initially upgraded to it, for some reason modified the boot.ini file of my system and threw a random partition number in for default boot. Uninstalling it fixed it, but re-install it caused it to occur again so maybe you got one of those wild hare installs for IE9 like I did for 8. One time a firefox install removed my file permissions to My Documents folder a couple years back.

 

[harshness]

Clearly, IE hasn't been sufficiently divorced from Windows to be a good Windows application.

 

[SatinKzo]

Clearly, IE hasn't been sufficiently divorced from Windows to be a good Windows application.

Because of a problem with PGP that may just be an isolated incident? I use all browsers at one point or another. Firefox has had it's share of security issues recently and cause me as much grief as IE has at times. I don't consider one browser to be superior to others at all, except I like most browsers better than Opera.

 

[harshness]

Because of a problem with PGP that may just be an isolated incident?

No proper software application should do damage to any other proper software application. Ever.

PGP has been around long enough (and enough people are using it) that it should be considered a proper application that must not be trampled on.

 

[SatinKzo]

I have PGP on 3 computers and IE9 didn't do anything to my installs. Like I said, maybe he got a goofy install for some reason. I had a weird IE8 install that was isolated. Never figured out why it messed with my boot.ini file at all, but it did it twice. I cannot blame what MIGHT be an isolated problem on a program when I factor in all the variables on every PC around the world that might throw programs for a loop. However, maybe there is something that IE did and others will start reporting also. Time will tell, I have not heard of anything odd widespread. Even my IE9 64bit shortcut replacement seemed to be isolated.

It's not just a PC/Windows issue either, I have seen random things go haywires on OSX and ubuntu when upgrading stuff that is more integrated to the OS than normal things.

 

[LER]

We'll see what the CIO office says as I reported it up the chain. I also noticed that they pushed a IE9 blocker today through our automated stuff, so apparently there are other issues with it in OUR environment.

 

[Frank Jr.]

I have installed IE9 on three computers I maintain. In the pro department it is fast. In the con department if you pin shortcuts to the task bar it disables most add-ons, will not install on a WindowsXP OS, no free add blocker like FF has and still some occasional site incompatibilities.

 

[SatinKzo]

We'll see what the CIO office says as I reported it up the chain. I also noticed that they pushed a IE9 blocker today through our automated stuff, so apparently there are other issues with it in OUR environment.

yeah, I am actually surprised that you would have upgraded so soon if the company is of any size, but too hard to guess corporate policies everywhere. Many of my clients are still standardized on IE7. In my past days being responsible for application testing, I usually allocated 2-3 weeks per application to let the users/testers put something like this completely through it's paces and being sure it was not going to cause any issues. So that meant sometimes it was 6 months of testing to ensure compatibility with all our applications that we ran.

I have installed IE9 on three computers I maintain. In the pro department it is fast. In the con department if you pin shortcuts to the task bar it disables most add-ons, will not install on a WindowsXP OS, no free add blocker like FF has and still some occasional site incompatibilities.

Yeah, it is a very fast browser for me also. FF4 is fast as well, both have the GPU acceleration going and both have bombed at times when using it. Who knows.

Not to stray off topic, but speaking of updates, I didn't get my "what-has-become-daily" adobe update of some sort today.

 

[LER]

I'm notoriously an Early Adopter, and being that it's IBM, we can do that. Just no support, per se, from the help desk. But someone's got to be the guinea pig. They also REQUIRE us to run Windows Update and auto-install the critical updates EVERY DAY. So, I just was doing what I'm supposed to, but hadn't see the IE9 blocker from the auto-update stuff. It also may not have been out yet.

I had all my stuff backed up, and the re-image isn't a killer.

 

[LER]

Oh, and I also work on a WebApp SaaS product, and we have to support IE9, so I wanted to see what it looked like. (https://www.blueworkslive.com)

 

[SatinKzo]

I'm usually an early adopter also and the ease of VM's has made my early adopter habit easier to deal with when things blow up. You being on the developer side, yeah, you are used to having to be on the bleeding edge (I'm sorry, beta releases don't cut it for guys like you for the most part). I come from a manufacturing background, so we are generally 1 - 2 releases behind because of expensive customized software for process control so our testing was always so extensive we joked that we gave the program a colonoscopy before blessing it for production ennvironment.

 

[LER]

It's worse than that, we still have to support IE6. (as well as 7, 8, 9), and we also support FF3/FF4, and sort of support WebKit (Safari, et al).

So, we have a mess of stuff.

 

[Poke]

Yeah IE 9 great I have not had any issues with it 8 was fine as well but I have been using 9 for awhile... Security wise IE always been the best this has been tested many times Firefox is ok but I always advise my users to use IE over anything else out there.. Marc Maiffret has pointed this out as well plus many other security experts and companies that do testing on many different browsers..

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