Sunday, April 27, 2008

Codeplex, IE, and Firefox

Ok, maybe my system was completely screwed up and that's why it didn't work. But to the best of my knowledge I have a Vista Ultimate installation including IE 7 maintained by Microsoft Update. It has the latest and greatest patches installed. Today I went to codeplex.com - Microsoft's answer/contribution to the open-source community - and tried to download a few Sandcastle bits. I used Internet Explorer for it since I thought "It's a Microsoft site so the Microsoft browser should be fine." Well, it wasn't. When I clicked one of the two download links for Sandcastle I was presented with an overlay window (no pop-up) containing some licensing information. Before I was able to click the "Accept" buttone the overlay disappeared, and .... nothing happened. I restarted IE, and tried multiple times, eventually I got fast enough that I could actuall click the "Accept" button. Still it didn't work. Despite my recent experience with a different Microsoft Site that serves IE only, I thought it is at least worth a try to use Firefox. From there it was a breeze. Everything was straight forward, working flawlessly. Which leaves me wondering whether the guys who maintain the Codeplex site test mainly on Firefox.... (Onto my soap box: Microsoft - in my opinion - has started to move in the right direction. At the same time I believe it has still a long way to go until it competes on merits and great products and services only.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Manfred,

We test the website using both Internet Explorer and Firefox, as well as other browsers. I'm sorry for the trouble you experienced.

Drew Miller, CodePlex developer

Manfred Lange said...

Hi Drew,

admittedly my comments were a little bit harsh. I apologize for that.

I'm sure you do test for the mainstream browser whether they come from Microsoft or not. I also understand that it is never easy to make sure that a web site always works for all target browers.

And as I said in my post: It could well be that my system was screwed up in that moment. In the meantime the box in question received a health-reboot and now it's working again.

Thank you for your fast comment, though! And keep the good work rolling!

Cheers,
Manfred.

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