Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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).)

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.

Any citations here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com