One of my reasons for starting this blog is to provide a sort of “how to” notebook for myself and others comprised of stupid little fixes for problems in the tech world.
This effort was inspired by a blog post made by Matt Cutts (currently an engineer at Google) who was, in turn, inspired by someone he went to college with who did this also.
So, without further ado…How To Stop Internet Explorer 7 From Nagging You.
Internet Explorer 7 while new and shiny as of this writing is still just playing catch-up to Mozilla Firefox in my opinion. I inadvertently installed on my main computer that I use for work. I call it inadvertent but Microsoft calls it a necessary upgrade and tried to slip it into Windows Update at every turn.
Every time I would run IE7 it would nag me about my “Security Settings” and how they were dangerous to my computer. Now I don’t use it except when I have to verify that a web site I’m setting up runs in IE since as of this writing IE still has an 80% browser market share (not for long hopefully) or when I try to use some presumptuous web application designer’s excuse for a cross-browser compliant web site. But, alas, the nagging was getting old.
The Fix (in Windows XP at least)
There is no way to disable this warning via Internet Explorer’s user interface, although it is possible to disable it using Group Policy (gpedit.msc). Navigate to Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Internet Explorer. Set “Turn off the Security Settings Check feature” to “Enabled”.
No wonder Apple made this commercial. It’s meant to highlight annoyances in Microsoft Vista but IE7 behaves exactly the same way.