I would love to tell you that I was able to install and test IE9 Platform 3 tonight. There seems to be a lot of good things in there (SVG improvements, canvas, audio, video) but the main problem is that it’s built on the fragile Windows stack. That’s not to say that other OS stacks aren’t fragile, but this is just tonight’s frustration.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Happy Meal with extra cheese. Sony Vaio laptop.

Download and run iepreview.msi.

The installer downloads and tries to install KB2120976, KB2028560, KB2028551 first.

In the process of doing this, it aborts and says:

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2739.

The failure window in the installation wizard has an “Installation Help” button. This button does nothing.

Thanks for the help!

Do a little sniffing around the web and find this page which tells me to run regsvr32 from an elevated command-line prompt to register the JScript DLL.

I do that.

Installer gives me the same exact error.

Then I decide to look at each one of the KB security patches. Each one tells me that I have to “Install the Genuine Windows Validation Component”. No matter what browser I try this in, it never seems to take – I always end up clicking on “Genuine Windows Validation, Alternate Method”. This gives me an .exe that I run that gives me a code to punch into a web form that tells Microsoft that I have a non-pirated copy of their software so I should be eligible to download software that will fix their software.

Right.

In each one of these patches, I get a dialog box that says

The update is not applicable to your computer

So this must be why the installer is failing, I guess? Maybe I could dig into why this problem is occurring, and hack around it. Let me just look at the source of the installer… oh wait…

So is this a broken installer? I’m not the only person who’s had this problem so far… go to the IEBlog announcement and search for ’2739′.

P.S. I also love how the IEBlog redesign doesn’t let me link to individual comments anymore.

P.P.S. I am really trying to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, but c’mon…

And don’t forget to visit Ouijapad.com frequently for all your paranormal needs.

This time, I used SVG-edit. I’m happy to say that features like Zoom and Path Editing mean that this is now very achievable. Might I dare say “fun”? Incidentally these are features that Fyrd did in his spare time. Ok, well Layers do help here too.

For whatever reason I had some issues on the trunk with some path nodes and control points becoming out of sync with the shape twice. I had to start a new Firefox tab and paste the image in there to keep editing – the modern equivalent of ‘rebooting’?

As with the previous comic, see if you can find the ‘easter eggs’ without viewing the source!