Lazycoder

MSN Toolbar with tabbed browsing

Wow, this thing really sucks. Opening a new tab causes the entire screen to flash, swapping between tabs causes the entire browser window to flash, pages take longer to render than they used to. This thing is so far behind Firefox, hell it’s so far behind the 3rd party IE derivatives that add tabbed browsing, that the MSN team should be embarassed that this thing was ever released, let alone with an actual version number rather than as a “beta”.

Not to mention that installing the damn thing required a REBOOT, and it wasn’t a polite reboot. There was no progress dialog, no dialog box asking me if I wanted to restart my computer now or later. My system suddenly started asking me if I wanted to save open documents and the “end task” dialog boxes started popping up. That’s really unacceptable. First, it’s a friggin’ BROWSER TOOLBAR. Why is a full system restart needed? Yahoo and Google can figure out how to install their toolbars without restarting the entire system, why can’t MSN Search.

This thing is such a piece of crap, I’m actually going to uninstall it because I’m worried about the quality of the developers that wrote it and the code they put in it.

I’m writing this and tracking back to Dare and the MSN Search teams in the hope that they will learn something. If they don’t learn anything, they shouldn’t be surprised if in 5 years they are trying to get their toolbar to work under Safari.

update> Oh this just gets better and better. If I remove the MSN IE Search Toolbar, I also have to remove the Outlook Search bar and the MSN Deskbar. Both of which I actually like. I can’t just turn off the IE toolbar. Nice. Well, if it uninstalls the Desktop Search engine at the same time, it looks like I’m going back to Google desktop search or Copernic Desktop.