Internet Explorer compatibility issue with YouTube - the solution

Posted on March 29, 2008 | Category: Media, Science & Techno, video

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.

» Filed Under Media, Science & Techno, video

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