Further proof, as if it were needed, that both webmail and IE are offences against man and God.
I had to submit, this morning, a PowerPoint presentation by email to one of my professors. Now, I remember when sending large email attachments to someone with a dial-up internet connection was a deeply unpleasant thing to do, and the habit of avoiding sending email attachments if I can help it has stuck. I still prefer instead to host the files on a web server somewhere and send a link to them, which I did in this instance, even though the file is only ~250k.
Which would have been fine if IE didn’t think it an oh-so-clever trick to open .ppt files in a plugin rather than downloading them. Of course, the way to get around this shitty behaviour is to right-click the link, and choose ‘Save As’. Or rather it would be, except that the bunch-of-arse webmail client my professor was using, when it comes across a url in an email, doesn’t create a link to that url, but instead creates a link to an automatically generated redirector page, which then passes you on to the actual link target (which means that, if you try to get it to save the link, IE just sulks and pulls silly faces). What purpose is this retarded behaviour supposed to serve besides breaking the browser’s ‘save as’ function?
Yes, I realise there are still ways to save the file, and my professor does now have it. But it should have been a trivial matter, and it wasn’t.