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Comment by johns | Hacker News Reader

Any site that uses this should be classified as malware. Is this really the sort of relationship web developers want to have with users?

I hate IE6 as much as the next guy, but most people running it don't have the choice. If you choose to be hostile to helpless users subject to poor management, they're going to blame you and your site, not their browser.

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While I agree with most of what you are saying.

>> but most people running it don't have the choice

how do you know this ?

I know from personal experience and previous threads here that most people running IE6 are doing so in a corporate environment they have no control or influence over. My wife is a great example. Large company with 10s of thousands employees, all running IE6 with no other options. Sure there are some home users out there still running it that don't know any better, but I'm betting they pale in comparison to the number of corporate IE6 instances.

Not to mention that this could get you in some legal hot water depending on where you live.

Where, Iran?

What if you want to iterate over the return value of document.open? It's perfectly legal ECMAScript.

If I write a program that randomly crashes when I type in the URL of your website, should you be liable for that? Of course not. Any crash is Microsoft's fault, not the web developer's.

Intent matters. You won't get in trouble for exploiting buffer overflows while taking a computer security class, but you sure would if you used it against someone maliciously. (And, like it or not, intentionally crashing someone's browser is malicious (and the intent is not hard to prove, given that it's done with $.crash).)

Any citations here?

Both are correct.

1) Intent matters. Clients won't go to your site.

2) It is MS' fault. No amount of JS should ever crash the browser, at worst it should replace the page with "sorry this page has crashed, please continue browsing elsewhere" like what chrome does.

And I'm sure your users will instantly recognize that.

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