good old Internet-Explorer

The mighty MAC.

Internet-Explorer 5.2 for MAC.

I’ve about had it with good old Internet-Explorer 5.2. It is by far the most unstable browser I’ve ever driven.
I don’t think I’ve ever had FireFox lock up; Netscape 7.2 occasionally — but IE usually locks up every session.
IE 5.2 was the browser that came with OS-X; as did Apple’s Safari which I haven’t used. FireFox and Netscape were free downloads.
My old 5.1 (under 9.2) was fairly stable, but 5.2 is terrible.
I do my e-mail via the Internet and IE, a MyWay-account, like a Yahoo-account. —Which means I can do the e-mail anywhere that has a ‘pyooter: e.g. De Land Public Library, the Tally-Ho lobby, and the ‘pyooter-room at Hampton Inn in Raynham.
But last night IE locked trying to open an e-mail from David Connor.
Of course, maybe I wasn’t giving it long enough. Gates and his merry band like to calculate the value of Pi to 89 bazilyun digits (“Please wait while Windoze calculates the value of Pi. OOOOOOOOOOOHHMMMMM.........”).
I remember trying to fire up aerial photographs of Philadelphia Airport With Jack’s vaunted PC-laptop.
I don’t think we ever did — hourglass city!
Of course we’ll hear a torrent of noisy excuses here: like I mucked up the site with my tinker-toy MAC eight weeks earlier.
I’m used to getting results in 30 seconds or less. After that I think it’s time to force-quit the app.
But last night’s IE-hang wasn’t even letting me force-quit.
It had gotten to the spinning soccer-ball — the Apple equivalent of the Windoze hourglass; although Apple apparently has another passing-time indicator: the miniature ticking wristwatch.
Windoze has apparently gone beyond the hourglass too; 89 bazilyun icons to indicate passing time.
But they apparently haven’t gotten beyond the NEED for a passing-time indicator.
So I couldn’t force-quit IE with the mouse. The mouse-arrow had converted to the spinning soccer-ball, so wouldn’t activate anything.
I couldn’t even access the force-quit menu.
There also is a keyboard force-quit, but I didn’t think to try that. Who knows if it would have worked. (It works.)
So what I had to do was pull the plug on OS-X; thank ya Gates. First time!
I have to keep IE because that is the preferred browser for most online ordering.
But I think I’ll start doing my e-mail with FireFox.
I successfully completed an online purchase at LL Bean last night with FireFox.

“IE” is Internet-Explorer.

RE: “De Land Public Library, the Tally-Ho lobby, and the ‘pyooter-room at Hampton Inn in Raynham.....” My mother-in-law lives in De Land, Floridy; the old “Tally-Ho” motel was where we once stayed in northern Delaware; the “Hampton Inn in Raynham,” Mass. was where we stayed for the wedding of my brother Jack’s daughter Rachel.

“David Connor” is a cousin that lives in North Carolina.

“Gates” is Bill Gates, head of Microsoft.

“Jack” is my all-knowing macho blowhard brother-in-Boston, who has noisily declared that anything other than a Windoze PC is a mere Tinker-Toy — e.g. MACs.