Nice one IE

Over the last few days I having been bringing back my old Vaio laptop from the dead. I purchased the laptop many moons ago, before my adventure into the world of Apple. But once I had found utopia with OSX the little Sony got put away some where and forgotten about. Meanwhile Microsoft have seen sense and 180’d on their views and IE8 will be the first fully functional standards aware MS web browser. The beta landed at the beginning of March and I’ve been keen to try it out. So what better chance to format, install and rebuild the once forgotten machine.

So off I went, install XP, service pack, updates, more updates. Now onto web browsers, update to IE7, then find the IE8 beta page. Right install. Whilst I was watching the bar as it checks for web updates I thought to myself will this install over IE7? Or will I have to versions of IE I can play with? It was the first, installed over version 7, so all I have is IE8 beta. Not a problem as also installed on there is Firefox, Opera and Flock (got me some browser love going on).

Thinking nothing about it went about my routine. Ahh rumours of Service Pack 3 for XP are running through the vines, lets do an update and see what is about. As most people know, windows updates are just web pages with activeX magic that update your system, but they need to be run from Internet Explorer. But here is the kicker, not from IE8!

On firing up the update screen I was greeted with an error screen to say my browser was not supported and that I should be using IE5.5 or higher. Clever that I always though that 8 was higher than 5. Panic set in as I thought I have now upgraded the only web browser that will work with Windows Update to a browser that it not know by Windows Update! But to my saving IE8 has a clever little feature ’Emulate IE7’ this not only makes pages look like they would in IE7 but also convinces Windows Update that you can update your installation.