A few years ago, Microsoft started making www.msn.com the default homepage for their installations of Internet Explorer 5. I didn’t personally like the move but at least I knew how to change my default homepage. The majority of my users do not know how to do this and so end up, just as Microsoft planned, staring at msn.com every time they launch their browsers.

Now, this is relatively harmless behavior until you take into account a change that Microsoft made either late last week or sometime this weekend. They’ve made a change to www.msn.com that crashes Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh. Yup, that’s right…Microsoft has changed the coding on the default homepage for their IE5 browser on the Mac that crashes the very browser in question. And it gets worse. Since the only easy way to change the default homepage in IE5 is to do it in the browser itself (in the Preferences) and the browser is crashing with a spinning beachball of death (SBOD) when you launch it, there’s now a classic Catch-22. How can users change the homepage to something else if you have to do it in the browser, but the browser crashes loading the page?

For those with a burning desire to know the solution, press escape or disconnect from the net. Two questions are raised by this, and both of those revolve around the demon of stupidity:

- Who still uses IE 5?
- Who at MS coded and approved the page?

Those two questions alone can keep the demon of stupidity rotund and happy for days to come.

Via: The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

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