Microsoft UK responds to FrontPage bug report

Richard Barry ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 06 May 1998 13:02 BST

US Report: Microsoft, BugNet at odds over FrontPage 'bug'

We asked Microsoft UK for a comment.

Microsoft product manager, Guy Swarbrick said reports of the bug in the company's web authoring software, FrontPage, are "accurate up until the point where the story describes it as a bug". Asked what it was, Swarbrick said: "It's not a bug because the program is doing what you ask it to do and it's incredibly unlikely any ordinary user would ask the program to delete the hard drive."

Swarbrick said the circumstances where a hard drive could be wiped by FrontPage are "extremely remote". He conceded that Microsoft had "overlooked" the potential for such a problem and said it was likely a "dialogue box" advising users of the possible danger they face when creating webs in the root directory would appear in the next version of Frontpage, due Q4 this year.

As a word of warning Swarbrick said: "Just don't create webs in the root directories of your hard drives."