bad IE6 patch causes manager crashes

For those of you who use IE6 on Windows XP and have been noticing that lately the MODx manager causes your browser to crash, check out this article:

Microsoft patch can cause IE trouble
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6106039.html

i swear, M$ always breaks the current software with bad patches when they’re about to release a new version (remember how they progressively destroyed Windows 98?)...

But IE 7 will be free (of course) and it will be pushed with Windows Update, so many people will upgrade anyway. I don’t believe they do it on purpose; after all, what would be the benefit for MS?

For one thing, IE 7 won’t run on Windows 2000, which is affected by this patch. So if you really want or need to use IE, say a large corporation has an intranet with an IE-only internal web application, you have to upgrade your Windows.

There are some legitimate reasons for M$ wanting to herd all of us along their product development cycle. For example it’s certainly much more work and investment for them to patch and support older software as well as the most current versions. And a lot of bugs get worked out in the process, so support for current software is more straightforward than for umpteen million other versions. So it’s not as if wanting people to upgrade is necessarily evil.

What I don’t like is that it seems to me as if all of a sudden software that works just fine before being patched becomes much slower and buggier after patching, and sometimes I do suspect an ulterior motive in this. With Windows 98 it was incredible what a negative effect some of the later "upgrades" had on its performance. I think they were legitimate patches written to close security holes and deal with other bugs, but they were so poorly written that they slowed the system down to an unbearable crawl.

It’s all about planned obsolescence. Microsoft sells most of its software through PC vendors, so of course they have an interest in creating software that will only run well on new machines. It’s just the nature of the beast to aid that process whenever possible.

Apparently, a fix will be released next week. Heh heh...a patch for a patch, so to speak. In the meantime, looks like a good opportunity to convince upper management that switching to Firefox is a good idea. This is but one more reason why I’m switching to Macs. M$ has pissed me off way too many times in the past few years.