If you have a newly installed IE7 (not company preinstalled), or reverting back from a beta IE8 install. You will have an annoying redirect to this URL (http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx) every time you time open IE, regardless of what your homepage is setup as. First it foes to this page: (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=54834 –) and redirects itself to the runonce.msn.com page.

The page itself is harmless and actually supposed to be help full for a newly installed IE7, so that you can customize your IE setup. But after you choose your settings not that it only doesn’t save the chosen options but also goes back to the same time whenever you open IE. Needless to say, it very annoying. This is how the runonce.msn.com page looks like:

Short Solution: copy & paste this three line in a notepad and save it with .reg (ie IE7.reg) extension and run the reg file after saving it. This should automatically edit the necessary setting needed to fix this problem.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“RunOnceComplete”=dword:00000001
“RunOnceHasShown”=dword:0000000

Long Solution: Run regedit from Start –> Run –> regedit. From there, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main and you will see the obvious entries that needs to be changed, you can add the above entries manually:

The problem seems to with third party anti-spyware which are doing it’s job by preventing you from editing your registry settings from URL, and doing it’s job very good.

Browser wars never end and Acid2 test is considered the ultimate yardstick for web standard compliance.
Here is some history and background of Acid2 test from wikipedia:

Acid2 is a test suite published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in browsers and authoring tools. Acid2 was released on April 12, 2005. It has been developed in the spirit of the Acid1 test from 1998. The Acid tests test many features on a single page and report test results graphically.

Acid2 tests features of HTML and, more prominently, CSS. The purpose of testing such features is to highlight the problems with browsers that do not display it correctly. The Acid2 test should render correctly on any browser that follows the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications. Because Acid2 tests how web browsers deal with faulty code, the test is intentionally not written to W3C CSS standard specifications, and fails validation. This is expected and was the intention of its designers.

Let’s test out the leading browsers and see how they handle Acid2 test, including the latest IE8 beta .

(click on images to get larger size)

IE7:

IE8:

Firefox2:

Safari:

Opera:

Netscape:

Safari and Opera are the only browsers that seem to pass the Acid2 test. IE8 is very close but not quite there.

In it’s own words Microsoft promotes IE8 for “professionals as well as those trying CSS and scripting for the first time.“, because of it’s built in tools for debugging purpose. ReadWriteWeb has done a great job promoting IE8, this is what they had to say regarding it’s standard compliance:

There were hints that IE8 would be a remarkable offering on the IE Blog as they released tidbits about the browser’s capabilities. For example, the announcement of IE8’s passing of the Acid2 test (a test for standards compliance) marked a milestone in IE8’s development. The standards mode was originally going to be turned off by default letting web developers code for it by including a “meta” tag to make use of IE8’s new standards compliant mode. Later, Microsoft came to their senses and made the default the standards-compliant mode.

That’s great news. It seems Microsoft has finally done something right, regarding IE, by following web standards; which has been a cause of headache for many web developers and freelancers like me trying to get websites compatible for two different browsers.

Let’s look at some IE8 standard compliance power:

Readwriteweb.com under IE8:

Readwriteweb.com under Firefox: (the way it was supposed to load)

I was trying to load linux.com and it tells you microsoft’s feeling towards open source software by the way it was loading the website:

All off this are reproducible by IE8. Try it at your own risk.

I am sure IE8 has some good new interesting features, but I was busy trying to find problems with it. And you have to admit this was way too easy. Next time I will I will try to point the new features, some of which are quite interesting.