Time and time again I have seen admonitions on the net to upgrade to safer browsing with IE8. I don’t recall seeing warnings of risks involved in the process. It sounded risk free.
Tonight I decided to check the IE 8 button on the windows update list with an old XP lap top that I use occasionally. It had IE6 and SP3 with the latest updates.
I soon discovered my computer had no browser. The install went normally but when I tried to start IE 8 nothing happened. I saw a little disk activity, but that quickly ceased. Fortunately I had another computer. If someone without a second computer had done what I did and didn’t know how to uninstall IE 8, they would have had no way of getting back on the net and any support.
I quickly discovered many people had the same problem going back to the beginning of IE 8. I didn’t discover any immediate solutions. To add to the problem, some posts suggested updates and SP3 could relate to the problem. I have had lots of problems with lots of programs, but I can’t remember the last time I had a program that didn’t even start. It sounds like an early beta kind of problem. The possibility of losing all browsing ability seems high risk to me for consumer users.
Based on my experience I would say the ordinary computers uses such as are targeted by the IE 8 campaign should definitely not install IE 8.
How does M$ think it can get people off IE 6 with something that doesn’t work on some machines.
P.S. While writing the above I was uninstalling SP3 and going back to SP2. Lo and behold, IE8 started with SP2. Now I have a safer browser with a less safe operating system.
Was it SP3 or an update after SP3? Do I spend another evening trying SP3 with no updates and then add updates? How do you keep a machine current if you risk hosing your IE with Windows updates?
