McAfee and Internet Explorer 8 Beta

I am not sure why McAfee’s security suite has such a strong dependency on Internet Explorer, but ever since I installed IE 8 beta on my machine in late august of last year (2008) – the Security Center would come up blank. I was able to continue using my machine and McAfee would perform its scans and updates properly. The only thing that I could not do was change my settings or cancel a scan or any number of other things that would need the scanner’s UI.

After almost 6 months of waiting for McAfee to release a fix for this issue – I just gave up and uninstalled IE8 (uninstallation was smooth and clean and it automatically puts IE7 back on the machine).

I miss IE 8, but I needed to check on some warnings that McAfee was notifying me off, but I just could not view in the Security Center. So now I guess I have to wait until IE 8 is released as a finished product and then wait for McAfee to update its product.

Seems to me that such a strong dependency on a 3rd party product is just a recipe for trouble. And if you do have such a strong dependency – I would assume that you would push out a fix as early as possible, that way by the time IE 8 releases to all computers, all of them will be in a position for McAfee to continue working properly.