“Undocumented Feature” (i.e., bug) in MSIE8
Free software is nice, and free updates of new features to existing software is usually terrific. I experienced a bit of a difficulty with one of my latest free software updates, and I thought I’d share it with you, my readers, to save you some heartache.
NetFlix is a pretty popular movie rental service – I subscribe, myself, and I love it. One of the things I love is that besides mailing me DVDs, they also let me watch all the streaming movies I want, anytime. It’s great on my laptop when I’m travelling or when my wife and I can’t agree on something to watch together. I suspect that millions of NetFlix subscribers all watch streaming movies on their PCs from time to time, so I was terribly surprised to learn (the hard way) that Internet Explorer 8 isn’t entirely compatible with it.
After several hours of diagnosis, troubleshooting, and eventually a few calls to Microsoft, I determined that the NetFlix viewer depends upon Silverlight, and that Silverlight, apparently requires administrative privileges to do everything the NetFlix viewer needs it to do. It’ll work fine if you log in as an administrator (which is generally inadvisable for security reasons), but if you use a standard, non-privileged user account, it will just keep prompting you to install Silverlight, even after you install Silverlight.
If you’ve already upgraded to MSIE8 and can’t get your NetFlix viewer to work, you can use “Add and Remove Programs” to uninstall MSIE8 and revert back to MSIE7. If you’re still having trouble with it, contact us, and we’ll be glad to help.
Oh, and I’ve already contacted Microsoft and NetFlix to suggest that they get their act together on this, but it couldn’t hurt for them to hear it from more of us…
April 7th, 2010 at 12:39
Internet Explorer 9 is available in beta – let’s see if it solves this issue…