Last week's MacWorld Expo saw a frenzy of support for Microsoft from Mac users who are finally starting to see the fruits of increased Mac development efforts in Redmond. The unveiling of Office 98 for the Mac drew fond applause, and the long-awaited Mac version of Internet Explorer 4.0 started shipping a week ago, complete with its free email and news client, Outlook Express. Could it get any better than this?

Apparently, the unfortunate answer is "hell yes." Reports of Mac-IE4's bugginess have been flowing in for days, and we're apparently not alone in our observations: Today's MacFixit proclaims that "records are made to be broken," and that Mac-IE4 has "generated more reports within the first few days of its release" than they've ever gotten for any other application in the past; tales of crashes, freezes, unexpected quits, and "out of memory" messages abound. And a HotWired article just plain says that Mac-IE4 is "lame," citing its slowness, its lack of features available in the Windows version, and the way it "breaks" many pages that use dynamic HTML-- which should work just fine. Nor is Outlook Express a paragon of happy computing; in addition to being plagued by the same freezes and crashes as its web-browser counterpart, it contains a nasty (though incredibly entertaining) bug described on MacInTouch: if you create a contact entry with a company name but no first or last name, all email you send out will be cc'd to that address. Yeek!

And that's just the tip of the big, ugly iceberg. All we can say is, we sure hope that Office 98 is considerably less nightmarish than IE4. After a few years of getting nothing but dreck like Word 6.0, we honestly would like to welcome Microsoft back into the Mac applications fold with open arms. But they've got some cleaning to do first; who wants to hug someone with bugs all over them? Crawly...