Wednesday, 9 March 2011

Microsoft 'Improves' IE to Break Automation

If you are finding that IE automation ("InternetExplorer.Application") is hung then you can blame Microsoft for an extremely badly thought out "enhancement".

If IE dies and you manually invoke it it will may display the "Your last browsing session closed unexpectedly. Would you like to restore your last session, or go to your home page?" dialog shown on the top right.

Not related to automation (so bug #2), notice that there is no button for "continue doing what I told you to" option so basically command line automation/invocation is also broken.

Anyway back to automation, if IE was in a state where it wants to display the dialog, it will hang when automated. Some really bright people designed this...

IE has recently become so reliable I have converted to Chrome :-)

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