Thanks for the votes so far everyone! 8-)
It's always been true that some sites - especially enterprise services - only work well with Internet Explorer. So at least it has gotten a lot better, but it also has lots of catching up to do. I'm curious to see how the Spartan browser that will come with Windows 10 will handle sites designed for IE since Spartan has been built entirely from scratch according to reports.
Chrome always keeps itself up to date by silently installing updates in the background that are often not fully applied until it is closed and re-opened. But for a while now I've had two problems with Chrome:
- It often tells me that there are unread posts here that I've already read, even - and most frequently - when I've posted a reply, and
- While I'm editing posts here (I don't really post on any other forums anymore so I don't know if it's this site specifically or not) and I delete a section of text or an Enter that I don't need, the text after it will get dropped down to 8pt font. I used to fight with this each time it happened, but I later realized that I could just do Ctrl+A, then pick font size 10pt to fix all of it at once.
The easiest way to get your preferences the way you like them in Chrome is to set it to sync your preferences to your account. That way all you have to do is log into your Google account within Chrome and all of your bookmarks, extensions, and settings are synced onto the current Windows profile! I don't think there's any real hope for IE though. 8-(
Num Lock was always set by the computer's BIOS/UEFI settings in my testing with all versions of Windows so far, including 7 and 8.1. Have you checked those settings to make sure that it's set to always turn on Num Lock?
What kinds of "mystery errors" are you getting with IE? It's been pretty stable and dependable in my limited experience and only really seems to give people trouble when they either install some junky extensions/add-ons/toolbars or when they're visiting web sites that don't support the particular version in use.