Slimming for the Beach

Apolo­gies to those of you who use Inter­net Explorer and have got an “Aborted” mes­sage when vis­it­ing this web­site. Hope­fully the issue is resolved now.

I would have con­tin­ued to be unaware of it but for Chris­tine Clear and Rose­marie Row­ley. Rose­marie sent me an email won­der­ing if my web­site had moved. In Christine’s case, her friends and fam­ily who use IE com­plained that they couldn’t access her web­site. As her web­site is cru­cial to her work, I offered to help track down the rea­son, as it was fine in Fire­fox, and so I opened the dreaded Vista and gave it a go.

These things can be like a nee­dle in a haystack, but finally I removed The Pale Blue Dot, that won­der­ful video excerpt from Carl Sagan’s TV series from, I think, the sev­en­ties, which was embed­ded in her site as a YouTube video. Sud­denly IE was happy, Chris­tine was happy and I was happy.

But then this morn­ing I remem­bered that I too had that video embed­ded, along with sev­eral oth­ers in this and my alter­na­tive party website.

So I log out of my Ubuntu (Linux) com­fort zone, and fire up the dreaded Vista and Inter­net Explorer (7) once again.

Yup. It viewed both sites and then threw up the page Aborted notice and the page went to, iron­i­cally, an IE notice full of javascript. Thanks a bunch, Microsoft. You spend bil­lions devel­op­ing soft­ware and yet you can’t cater for the world’s most pop­u­lar video site. I nor­mally try to avoid MS bash­ing, but once again your crappy soft­ware has taken up far too much of my time. So now I have to trawl the web to find a solu­tion.
Thank­fully I found it at East­wood Zhao dot COM, for which many thanks.

The solu­tion is sim­pler, of course, but it’s not the YouTube stan­dard, so we have to do it the MS way once again.

May I implore those of you who use IE to switch to Fire­fox(or Safari — any­thing!).
For the more adven­tur­ous among you, con­sider Ubuntu. It solves all these prob­lems at once, as Fire­fox is its stan­dard browser. You can see my Ubuntu site under Sis­ter Sites in the col­umn to your right.

Thanks once again to
Chris­tine Clear and Rose­marie Row­ley, and to
East­wood Zhao dot COM for the solution.

Also, hat-tip to Daragh and Graeme at Let­shost for main­tain­ing an inter­est in this problem.