Yes, good old common sense. That has a bearing on it, but the reasoning behind being able to see these apps for what they are goes deeper than that.

The reason that IE has always been a joke? To start with, the TCP/IP stack setup comes from the Unix Operating System, which was developed by Dennis Ritchie and company at Bell Telephone Labs, back in 1969. It has been Ma Bell's OS ever since. Microsoft perverted that stack by abbreviating it, and the Internet ran on the telephone system exclusively for years. That's part of the issue, but there's more. Another entity they refused to leave alone is Java. They changed it too. Remember when Microsoft borrowed Apple's OS to develop Windows, discovered that Apple had never bothered to patent the OS, so they did it themselves? Do you remember that? How they proceeded to take Apple to court, and forced them to pay royalties to use their own operating system? Well Sun did, so they took Microsoft to court because they had patented Java, and refused to allow Microsoft to modify it, because it was obvious that they were in the process of pulling the same exact stunt. If they modified Java enough, then they could get their own Java patent, and since theirs was the operating system that everybody was using, it's pretty obvious which one would be used. A federal judge happened to remember their stunt too, because when they went to court, they found themselves ordered to use Sun's version of Java, pay them royalties, and to pay Ma Bell royalties for the use of the TCP/IP setup they insisted on modifying. Microsoft wasn't happy about being beaten so badly at their own game, so they only forked over the royalties for previous use of Java, and proceeded to develop their own version of it that was too modified for the law to touch them over it. They still use this product, which they call Active X. But since nobody else used it (nobody wanted to pay them royalties when they could use Java for free), this left them as an incompatible entity on the brand new Internet. So they proceeded to offer the SDK for IE as a free app, so that anybody could modify IE, and offer their own browser as a free app. This enjoyed a mild success for a while, but these browsers were still just IE. The only one I ever found that's any good is called Fast Browser. It's a page reader. It will read the Internet to you. The effect this had, was that it did get Active X out there a little. So Microsoft proceeded to offer more free goodies to Internet developers, but it took too long to have an effect. Everybody still uses Java, and by the time they had a grip on a share of the web, patent laws requiring royalties had passed the expiration limit. And so much for Bill Gate's plans to own the Internet.

What a bunch of greedy jerks eh? But that really is the reason that IE has always been such a joke. It doesn't use the preferred cross platform programming language. Have you ever heard of such a complicated mess? Bill Gates thought he was pulling another fast one. Thought he was going to own the Internet. Unfortunately for him, you can go to the well once too often. Fortunately for the rest of us, that trip took place at the time it did, else he really would have wound up owning the Internet. Something that the American taxpayers had already paid for, because the Internet was developed by DARPA, not that British guy who keeps getting the credit for it on the web. Not sure what's up with that, but I suspect it has something to do with getting control of the Internet out of American hands. It was a might as well. Nobody on the planet has ever bothered to pay us back for untold trillions borrowed to rebuild from two world wars, so what's a WAN in comparison?

I love it whenever I get a chance to tell that piece of Internet trivia regarding Gates. The man has to be one of the greediest things that ever lived. The sole reason he has a foundation is undoubtedly for tax purposes, and he uses most of those donations to further entrench Microsoft products anyway.

But that's your issue. Internet Explorer is a joke because it's incompatible with a lot of things by design. They have added patches over the years so that most of those things can run, but you seem to constantly encounter them anyway. A small price to pay in order to not have to pay Microsoft rate fees for using the Internet eh?

Tim