October 15, 2009
Bonjour is Evil
I'm a FireFox user, so it was only a slight inconvenience: for months Internet Explorer has not worked properly. Most of the time, it would just spin, refusing to load a page, but also refusing to timeout. I installed IE8; didn't work. Uninstalled; IE 7 worked for a few days, long enough to perform a much needed system update. Upgraded to 8 again and continued working for a few days, then stopped again.
Three days ago I uninstalled the Bonjour software that Apple had surreptiously slipped into an iTunes update (this is the second time that it had installed, without me ever having an opportunity to say no to it). Suddenly Internet Explorer worked again. And has been good since then.Given that Bonjour messes with the networking code, and has a plugin component in IE, I can't help but thing this is stronger than correlation. The effect was immediate. I'll take this post down if IE begins failing again while Bonjour is not installed.