By Randall S. Newton
Editor-in-Chief
Autodesk is reporting through its network of employee-bloggers that Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) Release Candidate 1 breaks its DWF and DWG viewing programs. Users are being advised to avoid downloading IE7 until the problem is solved.
The affected programs include Autodesk DWF Viewer, Autodesk Design Review, and Autodesk DWG TrueView. These three Autodesk applications use HTML as part of their menu interfaces, and they look to the code in Internet Explorer for operational support.
The heart of the problem is that Microsoft Internet Explorer is more than a browser; it is part of the Windows operating system. As Autodesk employee-blogger Scott Sheppard explains, “In addition to the browser executable, Internet Explorer consists of many supporting libraries that are related to functionality as common as the opening and saving of files. Internet Explorer is really part of the operating system. It affects how HTML pages are browsed on the Internet or how HTML is used as part of menu systems for Windows applications.”
IE7 Release Candidate 1 includes a new code library that is not compatible with the Autodesk viewers. Sheppard says that “uninstalling Internet Explorer 7 and reverting to Internet Explorer 6 does not restore Autodesk functionality, because the supporting libraries from the Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate are left in place.”
Microsoft intends to make the final release of Internet Explorer 7 an automatic download for registered Windows users by November 1. A user might suspect the possibility of incompatibility if upgrading to a new version of Windows, but could be blindsided by an automatic update that does not take into account other installed products.
Microsoft has provided instructions for disabling automatic download of IE 7, which users of the affected Autodesk products should follow.
Uninstalling Internet Explorer 7 and reverting to Internet Explorer 6 does not restore Autodesk functionality, because the supporting libraries from the Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate are left in place.