About the IE 5.5 Experience

(Extracted from Windows Insider, August 24, 2000 - Vol. 3, No. 33,
By Scot Finnie, Winmag.com) (Click here)

This is a very preliminary report on Internet Explorer 5.5. More than 400 of you have sent me your often-detailed experiences with IE 5.5. Thank you! It's going to take a while to wade through them all. But I've gotten through the first 100 messages. They're about equally split between those who've had no trouble with the browser suite upgrade and those who have some sort of problem. Of the people who've been bitten by something, the percentage of those who've had a really bad experience is roughly 40 percent. If you're keeping score, that means 20 percent of the respondents had big problems. (Please note: Nothing about this is statistically valid.)

Even though I haven't worked my way through all the messages, I've seen enough to know that I have to eat my words about IE 5.5. What follows is a list of symptoms and problems that multiple people have experienced. I've divided it into Large and Small problems. What I didn't know before you took the time to write me with your experiences was the scope and variety of the big problems. It's because of that, and because IE 5.5 delivers so little real advantage over IE 5.0, that I've decided to place Internet Explorer 5.5 on Windows Insider's "Don't Install It" list.

Large Commonly Experienced IE 5.5 Problems

1. System-wide performance slow down. Virtually every person who reported this problem also noted that uninstalling IE 5.5 fixed the problem.

2. Inexplicable crashes, sometimes related to the MSHTML.DLL file.

3. Occasional IE and OE freeze up requiring Ctrl-Alt-Del.

4. Lots and lots of people have this problem: Very poor program and Web page loading performance. Greg McKenzie writes: "it takes 40 seconds for IE5.5 to load compared with about 5-10 seconds for IE 5.0." People also report that IE 5.5 doesn't load pages reliably, tending to time out, while other browsers installed on the same system have no problems.

5. System hangs on first reboot (and all subsequent ones) after what appeared to be successful installation. Reader Tony Heaton smartly solved this problem with by using the DOS-based SCANREG /RESTORE option.

6. Loses application reliability when multiple IE windows are opened. On some PCs, the instability begins when only two or three IE windows are open. Other people describe that symptom beginning at eight or nine open IE windows.

7. MSN Messenger appears to be problematic for some people. Justin Sulvetta wrote: "MSN Messenger causes odd behavior when using hyperlinks; to get around that, I just disable/kill that module as soon as I start up 5.5 and performance is far better."

8. Java applications no longer work.

Small Commonly Experienced IE 5.5 Problems

1. Windows Explorer-related problems are a definite trend. Mark Adelman described his folder problems this way: "When in Windows Explorer, when I try to pull down the folder list, I get two actions instead of one: The drop down rolls down and then rolls right back up." Microsoft told Mark that this problem was due to a conflict with his Microsoft IntelliPoint mouse driver, and that he should uninstall IE 5.5 until a newer IntelliPoint driver is made available. For the record, I use the IntelliPoint driver with IE 5.5 and have no problems. So this isn't a universal problem. But a lot of people have reported to me that they're having "unwanted double clicks."

2. Download problems, sometimes involving spontaneous closes of the IE browser window.

3. Printing problems. Lots of different kinds of printing problems, in fact, such as:

4. Browser window size/position problems, such as:

5. Strange user interface problems