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April 07, 1999 12:00 AM

A tip for IE 5.0 users

Windows IT Pro
InstantDoc ID #18610
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Thanks to Robert Williams and Patrick Laughlin for the tip: Internet Explorer 5.0 users that are bothered by what I call "the garbage string bug" will be interested in a nice little work-around. This bug occurs when you type a bad URL (usually because of a typo) into the IE 5.0 Address bar, only to have it replace the URL you did type with a garbage string ("res://shdoclc.dll/dnserror.htm") of characters. It turns out you can avoid this bug, and actually save some time by using CTRL+ENTER to launch a URL.

For example, let's say you want to visit Microsoft's Web site. Instead of typing "www.microsoft.com" (no quotes) in the Address bar, you can type "microsoft" (again, no quotes) and hit CTRL+ENTER. This will actually add the "http://www" and ".com" portions of the URL for you automatically. But the interesting thing is that it also bypasses the garbage string bug if you type of bad URL. So, for example, if you type "www.kdfjkldjasf", IE 5.0 will automatically fill it out to "http://www.kdfjkldjasf.com/" and then tell you that the page is bad without overwriting the URL.

The cool thing about this tip, of course, is that it's a real time saver anyway. So after the bug is fixed, you may want to keep using it anyway

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Comments
  • me
    8 years ago
    Jun 16, 2004

    For some reason this disabled it's self on win 2000 how would i enable it again ?

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