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.
Register
me June 16, 2004