Internet Explorer and Selecting Passwords

I just discovered that Internet Explorer 7 running on Windows Vista will not let you “select the complete password, NOT including the quotation marks” from the Links update email when it is displaying it when logged on to Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail—it insists on automatically selecting the quotation marks as well. I would not be surprised if it behaved this way on Windows XP as well, or if other versions of Internet Explorer did the same thing on whatever version of Windows they are running on, although I have not yet tested this.

This feature was surely meant to be helpful, but in this case it causes a problem instead. Here are a couple of ways to get around this:

• Select the password along with the quotation marks, then paste it into another program, like Notepad. Then, in that program, proceed to “select the complete password, NOT including the quotation marks”, etc. (Note that MS Word will behave the same way as Internet Explorer 7 unless you dig into the options and set it to not do that.)


• Use a different web browser, such as Firefox, Safari, or Opera. They are all free downloads, and they work well as web browsers. [Update 2009-04-08: Another good browser that’s now available is Google Chrome. I have not had a chance to test Internet Explorer 8 in this regard. If any of you have done so, let me know.]

Interestingly, Internet Explorer 7 running on Windows Vista will let you exclude the quotation marks when selecting passwords from the Links file itself. The Links email is in plain text to accommodate email systems that do not support HTML mail, while the Links file itself is made up of HTML code, one of the main types of program code used for web pages.