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Internet Explorer 7 upgrade Caution!
Microsoft Windows Media Video files won't play in current version of Microsoft browser
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If you've recently upgraded to Internet Explorer 7, you may want to revert to your old IE6 to avoid problems.
Users of Windows XP will receive an upgrade to Internet Explorer 7
automatically if they have Automatic Updates turned on in their
preferences, or will receive a notice that such an upgrade is
available. Many of you will have already upgraded your browser to
version 7 already because of this.
IE 7, unlike it's predecessors including the immediately previous
version IE 6, WILL NOT PLAY Microsoft's own Windows Media Video files!
Many "streaming video" clips on this website and others are in the
Windows Media Video format. We have chosen this format partly because
of the universality of playback -- every PC running Windows by default
has a copy of Windows Media Player installed, making it a "no brainer"
to play back video in the Windows Media Video format. Other formats,
such as Real Video or Flash required you to download a player. Although
installing these players is easy enough to do, distributing our
files in a format using the Windows Media Player which was
already installed on your system struck us as the most likely way to
have our viewers avoid problems.
Now, if you have Internet Explorer 7 on your system, a Windows Media
Video (.wmv) file will not "stream" (begin playing amost immediately)
on your screen. It will require you to download the entire file to your
computer then play it in the Windows Media Player. Why this is so is
unknown, but there are several other problems that IE7 has caused and
although I liked several new features in IE7, I have reverted to the
older IE6 after researching and finding that there are as of now no
known workarounds to the problems.
If you have not upgraded to IE7, I recommend that you do not. This will
be hard to avoid, since Automatic Updates has already done this for
you, and if you do not have your system set to automatically update
Windows, you will receive a "nag" screen every time you start up your
computer that "updates are available" and there is no way to
permanently disable this notice.
You can "downgrade" your browser to IE6. To revert to Internet Explorer
6, press the start key (or Start button on your screen), then select
"Control Panel", then "Add or Remove Programs." Find "Internet
Explorer" in the list of programs and press the "Remove" button. This
will revert to the previous version of Internet Explorer that you had
on your computer, most likely IE6.
If you liked some of the new features of IE7, particularly the "tabbed
browsing" which was a great convenience, I recommend that you install
"Mozilla Firefox", a competing browser that is highly recommended by
users. Firefox is available via a free download and is virtually free
of the problems that have plagued Internet Explorer such as popup ads,
start page hijacking and most other hacker attacks on your system
through your Internet browser. You can download Firefox here.
(Note: Windows Media video files do not always play in Firefox so you
may want to keep IE6 installed for viewing video and Firefox for
everything else.)
--Dave Sica
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