Internet Explorer Has Stopped Working

As faithful readers know, on weekends we get to relax from more serious topics.

It was nice, I suppose, that Internet Explorer 8 included tabbed browsing. There's something in it, however, that doesn't work well with Windows Vista. I guess it's too much to expect that Microsoft's web browser would work with Microsoft's operating system.

On my laptop, which runs on Vista, I use IE 8 to browse the web. A fair bit of the time, when I close a tab in IE, I get a window headed, "Internet Explorer has stopped working," with the further message, "A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available."

Gee, I closed a tab. It was supposed to stop working -- the tab, that is. I don't need a message taking up screen space and requiring me to close it.

And then, as if that isn't bad enough, when I close the message window, a further, little window opens up in the bottom right of the screen, with the heading, "Internet Explorer was closed," and this window says: "To help protect your competer, Data Execution Prevention has closed Interent Explorer. Click to learn more."

To help protect my computer! My computer needs protection from me closing a tab!

That window, at least, fades out by itself -- it doesn't have to be closed. But really, it kind of adds insult to injury to be told that "Data Execution Prevention" has closed Internet Explorer to protect my computer when all that was really happening was that I was closing a tab.

According to some Internet sources, some "add-on" is to blame, but really, I blame the operating system. Add-on or no add-on, it should be able to tell that I've just closed a tab. Come on, Microsoft, you can do better than this.