Microsoft sends in Spanish

I know, I know. The most predictable and boring thing you can do in a blog is to slag off Microsoft—and people often slag them off from a hidden envy. The company is so successful. Bill Gates is so rich.

However, the company can behave in a totally high-handed way. What has got my goat right now is what they’ve done to my copy of Internet Explorer 7.

I downloaded version 7 as soon as it was available. The only version on offer was in English, which suited me down to the ground. All my newer computers have Spanish operating systems, since I prefer to buy them here and support the local economy. But I prefer all my software to be in English.

Many expatriates will have exactly the same preferences. It’s not that I don’t know any Spanish, or that it’s that difficult to guess that elementos emergentes are pop-ups. I just feel more comfortable working in my own first language.

So what do Microsoft do? When I download a “security update”, the next time I open up IE7, it’s all in Spanish! Just as Bush sent in troops unasked to Iraq, so whoever is the current President of Microsoft has had the Spanish language take over my copy of IE 7. (I use the analogy because they both seem to me to be typical examples of American high-handedness.) How difficult would it have been for them to ask me, “Now that a Spanish version is available, would you like to update your copy of Internet Explorer?” They could even have asked me in Spanish and I would have understood.

Instead, they know better. (The analogy with Bush springs to mind again.) Because I have a Spanish version of Windows I must want a Spanish version of IE.

So now I have to remember to Abrir en una nueva pestaña when I want to open a link in a new tab. And so, presumably, do thousands of us English-speaking expatriates. Microsoft doesn’t know or care that there are a million of us in Spain. (More of us than in any other country in the world, except Australia.) No doubt Spanish speakers in the southern and western states of the USA have to use an English version of IE, if they have an English version of Windows.

What can we do?

I expect there’s something I can do. No doubt I could roll back the update—but then I’d be exposed to security threats. I could isolate the key DLLs, and swap them for English versions. But this would take a great deal of patient twiddling, and I could end up not being able to use IE at all. What I did do was spend hours on Google trying to find a simple answer—and came up with nothing.

If any reader of this blog knows an answer, please post a comment! You might be helping an entire community.