IE9 Release Candidate fixes the known issues with Windows Live Writer

In the past I had blogged about a few issues with IE 9 that might have you second thinking beta testing IE 9 on the same machine that you blogged with Windows Live Writer.  I am happy to say that with the Release Candidate that came out today all of the know issues between IE 9 and Live Writer have been fixed.  If are still having issues with the release candidate and Live Writer or Live Mail please make a comment in this post and also report the issue in the forums.

If you have been using the IE 9 beta it is recommended that you uninstall it before installing the release candidate.   Once you have done the uninstall you can find the new version at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/#/download.

Ed Bott at ZDNet has a great write-up about IE 9 and tweaks you might want to make if you find a few things different from what you are used to in IE 8.

Windows Live Writer and IE 9 beta problems

I never seen a perfect Beta and in the case of IE 9 the first public beta breaks a few things in Windows Live Writer.  In most cases the HTML changes from what Live Writer intended to publish.  You can also see this if you switch to the Preview or Source tab before you publish.  These issues can be seen in Wave 3 (14.x) builds or the Wave 4 Beta (15.x) builds.  Unfortunately there are no workarounds to the problems other than uninstalling IE 9.

Jimmy Bergmark points out in his blog that if you clear the Alt text or Title text field on a image that when you Publish (or go to the Source or Preview tab) that “alt” is added for the Alt text and “title” is added for the title.

Image alignment can change, again on Publish (or when you go to Source or Preview tab).  For example, Center an image and then publish and you will see it return to Left alignment.

What issues are you finding wrong with Live Writer used in conjunction with IE 9?  Please leave a comment on this post and we will try and pass along things as need to the IE 9 team.

THANKS for Beta testing IE 9.  It has a bunch of cool and fast features but you might not want to use it on the same machine you are blogging on with Live Writer right now.

 

Update: Some people have jump to the conclusion that I am advocating with this post that you should uninstall IE 9.  The point of this post was to inform you that there are issues that do not have a workaround and that IE 9 is the cause.  This is the risk you run with any Beta.  As tweets and comments are showing people are running into these type of issues and thinking something has broken with their Writer install or if they are using the Live Writer Beta think that there are these types of issue in the public Beta.  I included a link on the IE 9 image to download the product for a reason with my original post.  IE 9 is a great improvement and I have been using it on my Beta machine on a daily basis.  As I started my post by saying that I have never seen a perfect Beta and y’all should be aware of the issues.  Remember that you can always post as draft to your blog server and then fix up the alignment of an image or clear the Alt text on your image in your web based editor before you publish and still Beta test with IE 9.  This is not a perfect workaround but I encourage you to continue to give IE 9’s Beta a chance.

Update (2/10/11): The IE9 RC (release candidate) was made available today and fixes the problems written about above with Live Writer or Live Mail.  Uninstall any beta build of IE9 you have and then go to http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/#/download