Microsoft "force improved" me with an autoupdate that installed IE10 on my Win7 computer. For the most part it's not particularly objectionable, even though it's designed around the new pachinko machines, but it incorporates BY DEFAULT a "spell checker" that's incredibly annoying when I try to type anything here, and particularly when I use html codes in a post.

The most irritating feature is that <i> coding for italics, or <b> for bold (seldom used) is automatically changed to <I>, </I>, <B> and </B> but there are a few other common quirks. While theoretically most html codes are not case sensitive, and the codes might work okay in this case, those here should be aware that "spellcheckers" create more errors than they correct unless you're a twit/twatter that doesn't limit your usage to a grade school vocabulary or notepad abbreviated jargon.

I wasn't able to find any place to control what the smellchucker does by searching through the obvious places, but finally located a comment on a normally useless (for me) forum that indicated that the control is on the Tools menu, Manage Add-ons, where they've added a "Spelling Correction" link. The only "editing" you can do appears to be "add more dictionaries" in order to get even more useless mangling of what you type, but there is a "checkbox" down at the bottom where you can uncheck "enable spelling correction" (that must be a euphemism) to turn the whole %@$#@^ thing off.

IE doesn't tell you when you make the change, but the forum instructions say you'll have to close and reopen IE, or at least the page you have open, before the change is effective. (Ambiguity is one of the charming features of forum support, isn't it?)

IFF Microsoft has decided to "push" a change to IE10 for everybody, it's likely that others will have comments about what works and what doesn't based on their experience. The basic version is supposed to work with Win7 or Win8, but the last time I looked you had to get a "version specific" installation for WinXP or Vista. I don't recall seeing advertising blather about versions for earlier Windows.

Previous threads have discussed mainly whether to get it, so I'd suggest this one be mainly for "experiences with" this marvelous new product rather than speculation about whether it might be wanted, but all comments are welcome as usual.

John