Bug of the moment 2007-08-02

I was looking around Macintosh developer Stéphane Sudre’s site and was reading his Interface Buildozer page, when I came across something bizarre in one of his screenshots. The screenshot showed the resource fork of Internet Explorer 4.5 for Macintosh, and I went to investigate the phenomenon in Internet Explorer 5.1.7.

Sure enough, the latest Internet Explorer for Macintosh still has a “Guitar error” dialog box:

No message text is displayed, and Google throws up nothing useful about this dialog box, so I am at a loss to know why it is in there.

I rarely run Internet Explorer on the Mac, but every time I do, I am treated to a reminder about my Internet Unexplorer hack:

Unexplorer, or, better, Unopera, is a hack to facilitate browser plugin installation on Mac OS 9 and earlier. It’s useful when the installer refuses to acknowledge one or more browsers in circulation, and won’t co-operate until you install one that it does recognise (whereupon, you may have to find and relocate the plugin files).

I am not sure what the biggest WTF is with that mess, but the oddest one of all is the way that Internet Explorer takes on the icon of Unexplorer:

Or not, since then you have to understand how Apple implemented 32-bit icons.

Posted 2nd August 2007 – Comments and questions?