Senior program manager for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Dave Massey announced in his web log on Wednesday that after installing Netscape 8, the XML rendering capabilities of IE stopped working.
Massey said that a blank page was the reward when navigating from IE to XML files, like RSS feeds, or to XSLT transformations.
A “work around” was suggested for a temporary fix that involved uninstalling Netscape 8 and the editing the registry settings.
Though Massey doesn’t say which version of IE was affected, bloggers hint that the problem is with IE 6 with Windows XP Service Pack 2.
As Microsoft works with Netscape to resolve the problem, blog posts pour in with various complaints, pep talks, questions, criticisms, and conspiracy theories of intentional sabotage on the part Netscape.
According to one blog post:
“I really don't want to sound cynical, sarcastic or satirical, but that is one hell of a way to prevent users from switching to another browser.”
And to another:
“Shows once again that it was Netscape incompetence that led to IE's dominance, not monopoly ‘abuse’.”