Another Nasty IE Bug

01Jul09

 Plain and simple, I detest Internet Explorer. Why, some may ask? Internet Explorer is a retarded browser whose proprietary graphic rendering engine sucks, whose scripting engine fails, whose security does not exist AT ALL, and much much more. Thus, I don’t use IE, and I haven’t used it since a very very long time ago. I switched to Firefox when I realized how sucky IE is, and then when Google Chrome began as an open source developer project I signed up and started using it. But still, even if you don’t use Internet Explorer, it is responsible for many things in Windows, as it is directly tied-in to Internet Options and Connections.

Two days ago, I was writing an application that scraps a web database into SQL Server, when suddenly, Google Chrome, Visual Studio, and numerous other programs stopped connecting to the internet. The only major ones that still worked were Firefox and Google Talk. At first, I blamed my full CPU and thought that my computer was just crashing, but when the problem continued the next day, I knew something was up. As I noticed that the problem was spread out over many different programs, I knew that it had something to do with the internet settings that the default socket uses – Internet Explorer. Also, many people have had this problem, as reported on the internet. The fix is just as elusive as the culprit itself.

Some people said that reinstalling Internet Explorer would do the trick, yet this had no effect. While scrambling over the interwebz looking for a fix, I remembered that the HTTP proxy Fiddler automatically works with most programs including Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Visual Studio, and more, but with Firefox it doesn’t. To successfully debug out of Firefox, you have to go into the Settings and set it to use a special proxy for Fiddler, which would mean using the default socket! This is when I realized that the whole problem was related to a proxy server mix-up. I quickly jumped into the Connections tab in Internet Options, hit LAN settings, and voila! The “Use proxy server…” checkbox was selected, with no values in the textboxes for the configuration of said proxy! After unchecking the proxy server checkbox and checking “Automatically configure settings…”, everything began to work.

Which brings me to ask, why would some program that I never use suddenly think that my internet connection has changed? Did it think I had some problems conecting so a proxy server must be required? This bug is just retarded in my opinion, as the connection changes for no reason whatsoever when you don’t even ask it to change! Really, Microsoft’s IE programmers are morons, if they have bugs like this, not to mention this bug. Geez, Microsoft – you’re abusing your power!


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