Sometimes RunOnce is one time too many

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/10/29 09:46 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/10/29/5754751.aspx


Former colleague, and consistently Australian regular reader Mike Williams asked in the Suggestion Box:

The issue at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2007/01/25/1526224.aspx

still hasn't been fixed. I think it is about a year since it was reported while Vista and IE7 were in beta.

Maybe you'd like to write that long-promised article about non-US English locales;-)

That was indeed the blog from the beginning of the year entitled Internet Explorer 7.0's language settings? This may be the last straw.... that inspired all of the healthy discussion!

What became clear in the investigation is that Windows was doing the right thing here, and Internet Explorer's settings prior to being launched (which are essentially based on the Regional Options settings) were also being handled in the expected way.

This user interface contained in that RunOnce page, however, is still pretty consistently ignoring all of the above settings (not just for UK English, either -- lots of languages are affected), and I have not had much luck  discerning or divining the owners of this particular generic service page.

I am generally of the opinion that the page should simply be bypassed entirely -- in the rare case where

  1. the user runs setup and makes choices, yet
  2. the first time they lunch the browse they would want different choices

The user can clearly find the special UI to make the changes. In all of the common scenarios, even if this UI worked right it is not needed, and the fact that it is still broken after all this time kind of indicates that not a whole lo\t of work is happening with it.

Rather than graduating from broken to useless, I think we should skip useless and move right to absent!

I will forward this suggestion onto the IE folks for them to consider....

Now the other issue about non-US English is going to need its own post, as I have talked to some people and have a better understand of some of the competing forces here. So that bit will have to wait for a little later in the week (perhaps given its frightening nature the upcoming All Hallows' Eve,would be best!).

 

This post brought to you byand(U+0ba4 and U+0bf2, a.k.a. TAMIL LETTER TA and TAMIL NUMBER ONE THOUSAND)


no comments

Please consider a donation to keep this archive running, maintained and free of advertising.
Donate €20 or more to receive an offline copy of the whole archive including all images.

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day