Monday evening, I installed IE7 on my wife's laptop. I wanted to test out some of our work and make sure IE7 wasn't breaking anything. I was also curious to see what my wife thought of it (for the record, I think it's an improvement). I got this in an email the next morning:

Oh, one thing I don't like about this new internet explorer is it won't let me get into the [her work's] webpage links or use the remote access, what's up with that?? Can we maybe switch back to the old one?

Links, in this case, meant links to PDFs. Apparently, you have to add the website in question as a trusted site to open PDFs in IE7. If you don't, it just opens an empty window with no warnings or errors. Good going, Microsoft. I'm not sure why remote access didn't work. Maybe the Citrix plug-in just needed to be reinstalled. Either way, I decided to leave it installed just to see if she'd warm up to it. Got this email today:

BTW, the new IE sucks, I can't copy and paste website links into emails, I had to get onto firefox.

She accesses her email through Microsoft Outlook Web Access Client. I'm pretty sure she uses right-click to copy and paste…so apparently that doesn't work either. Not good.

At this point, I'm just hoping this doesn't happen to me.


Written by

Fred Simmons

As a Managing Partner and the Director of User Experience at Gulo, Fred enjoys making website interactions more natural and improving UX design. Outside of work, Fred enjoys golf, BBQ, craft beer, movies where the bad guy wins, comma-separated lists, and talking about himself in the third person.