As you’ll note from the post of just a few minutes ago, I recently tangled with a little bit of Microsoft code-foolery in attempting to download their IE9 web browser.

I went back to my Bing search page and rather than clicking the top ‘organic’ result as I’m most apt to do, I decided to click on the top ‘paid’ listing – which was owned by Microsoft. I’m not going to argue or comment on the logic of paying yourself to have your products at the top of your search engine for keywords aimed at your product.

I reached the following, once again broken page, that alerted me that because I’m running on XP, I can’t download IE9 – I first need to upgrade to Windows 7. Meh. No IE9 for me now, probably no IE9 for me later.

Just when MS had an opportunity to possibly turn me back into their land, I am denied and will not be back anytime soon. I’ll still buy your OS because I won’t pay around $2,000 for a competitor’s system. Just don’t expect me to use your browser.

I was browsing various SMM (social media management) tools during lunch today and came across Seesmic. I was attempting to download their desktop client to play around a bit and noticed it was using Silverlight. Being in Chrome, I figured it probably wouldn’t work too well, so I fired up IE 8 thinking that I might have an easier time running a the MS silverlight. Logical right?

I copy/pasted the Seesmic link and IE8 kept crashing. Again and again. Its crashiness and general lack of standards compliance have kept me away from IE for years now. I only have it for testing purposes and when I need to download some proprietary MS control for Office etc.

So with all those crashes, I figured maybe its time I update IE to 9. I read that there have been improvements in standards compliance and such. A quick search and a click of a link and I ended up at http://beautyoftheweb.com – IE’s exposition of HTML5 and CSS3 codetasticness. Only problem, this is what I saw in THEIR browser.

Microsoft, if you really want to promote your new product that finally complies with front-end markup standards, then maybe you should create a download page that works on your older technology.