How to crash IE9 with some simple CSS | Hacker News Reader

How to crash IE9 with some simple CSS

tech.onefinestay.com

94 pointsandrewingram44 comments

The text doesn't mention if the bug remains in Internet Explorer 10. It would be interesting to know if the bug has been fixed in the latest major version.

Does Microsoft send out non-security updates for Internet Explorer 9 for those who are unable or unwilling to update to the latest version?

Unable to reproduce in MSIE10:

http://jsfiddle.net/4Zukm/

That code won't kill it, it seems to need a width and height, see this one:

http://codepen.io/beeglebug/pen/ntLbv

Doesn't kill IE10 on my box. V: 10.0.9200.16521

Microsoft should claim "We don't have Something like bugZilla". OR We are unable to reproduce the bugs you have claim.

Huh they do:

http://connect.microsoft.com/directory/accepting-bugs/intern...

Hello hp50g,

Thanks for your link

I have used http://webmatrix.uservoice.com/ too much. Search for google on this site with "Kristina". You found a lot of post written by me.

I just hate it because I can't gave it to fellow guys work on Linux and Mac. Secondly When I tried it it's crash too much. I write a lot of post their but atleast finally move to Sublime text 2.

Just wanted to make sure this CodePen breaks IE9 (before we confirm whether its fixed in IE10):

Confirmed kills IE9 9.0.8112.16421

It kills the page for me, but not the whole browser. Same build.

I'm guessing you're using Windows 8, but suspect that the bug still crashes MSIE10 on Win7. The two browsers look the same, but I suspect there are some drastic differences between their innards.

It doesn't crash IE10 on Win7

MSIE10 on Windows 7 here... works fine.

Just a heads up for anyone thinking of ugrading to IE10, it breaks several sites including FedEx, at least on Win7.

The great thing about IE is that is backwards compatible. A website can automatically trigger IE to render in a specific version using metadata tags. I believe it can even go so far as to force it into compatibility mode by default for the website.

For websites that don't do this you can create a special list which can even be managed by group policy.

I'm always very frustrated when organizations choose not to upgrade for "compatibility" reasons. That's baloney. They're just too lazy to properly configure their systems.

There are features in oldIE that you can't bring forward via compatibility mode. I don't have a full list handy, but XML Data Islands come to mind as something that has legitimately anchored companies I've worked with to IE6 (and not because I wrote apps using the XML Data Islands, for the record!).

It's not very hard to update that code to use non-legacy approaches, but it's a massive undertaking to even determine what code needs to be updated in some companies where hundreds of one-off apps are created and then never maintained, much less do the work to update them.

>XML Data Islands come to mind as something that has legitimately anchored companies I've worked with to IE6

Looking at the pages describing XML data islands, it looks like it would be a day's work to make a shim for other browsers using jQuery.

What other "features" would you miss out on by not using IE6?

The problem isn't fixing that in one application. It's determining which features are affected, how many of your enterprise's hundreds of internal apps are affected, and then putting together a plan to fix all of them. Often, no one has touched these apps for years, and the people who were familiar with them are long, long gone.

Even if it turns out that none of a company's applications need to be updated, the cost of determining that is far from zero. In larger companies it can be difficult to successfully make the argument for that cost.

XML data islands works even in IE10 in IE9 and older modes: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh801224%28v=vs.8...

Two of my clients were never able to get that to work in IE8 or IE9. Thankfully, we haven't needed to try in IE10 because we've finished a site-wide revamp at both to bring their apps current.

I've seen a couple mentions about that (Gmail being another site it breaks). What seems to be going on, and I don't have a Win7 machine to test on myself, is that something's causing IE10 on Win7 to incorrectly switch to compatibility mode on the affected sites. If you use the dev tools to switch back to IE10 standards mode, those sites work normally.

I think they should be able to fix that soon via Windows Update. I remember Windows Update made a change a few years ago that was switching all localhost:// addresses to compatibility mode, so there's probably an easily updatable list of sites that this happens automatically on.

IE10 on Windows 8 is not affected.

It's available in the Windows Update dialog, but it's not selected by default.

I think that's pretty much bull... it should be checked by default... when you choose to include recommended updates with important ones, it should include IE10 in that list. It's bad enough that IE10 a year ago was close to current, that it took nearly a year to release the thing, now they don't even push it out. IE9 should be effectively dead now, but it's not.

>Does Microsoft send out non-security updates for Internet Explorer 9 for those who are unable or unwilling to update to the latest version?

A crashing bug in a browser is usually considered to be a security risk, so this wouldn't be a non-security update.

Not always. Depends on the details of the crash. This particular case is actually a hang.

They actually do include non-security "GDR fixes" in cumulative security updates. See the KB article associated with them. For example a MS10-xxx security update fixed the "operation aborted" appendChild problem and made it actually work.

Test case: http://codepen.io/beeglebug/pen/ntLbv

ooooh I have a story similar to this

Back in 2010 I moved to a new city, and was trying to find a graphic design firm that wanted an in-house web developer. I shopped a resume (with prominent link to on-line portfolio) to all sorts of shops, never got a single call back.

A while later, I had brief access to a Mac, and decided to check out my site there (those were the dark OS 9 days when Mac testing was sort of optional). Turns out that a CSS glitch in IE Mac would take down — not just the browser — but the entire computer. I had been walking around crashing systems and losing peoples work for months.

I don't think you meant 2010 there...

Hopefully, Microsoft will get around to pushing IE10 to consumers soon. IE10's market shares stands at 2.35%.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20130218...

I look forward to it hitting double digits this year.

Did you report this bug to the IE team?

I'll ask Stuart (the author)

Could you ask Stuart to email me a test case so I can look at it? We tried looking for a way to get a hold of him but couldn't find any short of a general email address on the company site.

reybango at microsoft [dot] com

See above... http://codepen.io/beeglebug/pen/ntLbv

They'll just tell him that he should fix his CSS (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/microsoft...). The only thing publicly announcing a MSIE bug will do is subject the author to ceaseless attacks from "you're either with us or against us" Internet Explorer fans (speaking from personal experience.)

2013 Microsoft seems to be trying hard not to be 2009 Microsoft. Might be worth another shot.

I'd say "2013 Microsoft is trying hard to seem not to be 2009 Microsoft." Same words, but what a difference!

I've taken a second look at some MS products in the last couple of years. There's tangible improvement, to the point where I don't use what I used before in some cases. I switched to Bing from Google, and switched to Live Office (the free edition) from Google Docs. Google only wins in accessibility--I can reach everything easily from one place. That's where MS has a lot of room for improvement.

I would consider paying the $5/month for Office 365 if Google ever took away my free domain email hosting.

I don't see any MS employees answering there. Or don't they say so when answering on the newsgroups?

sorry but your company's browsers have caused many web devs to spend hours making their work look correctly in various IEs.

Nowadays there are frameworks like HTML5 boilerplate that help us along, but not so long ago it was extremely painful.

Worse are MS email clients even the most recent one which uses the MS Word engine to render html emails.

Further, if you want to create an innovative web app for mobile and desktop there is a ton more effort and work that needs to go in it if you want to reach the IE audience. It may not even work at all even after trying to get it to work - uggh!

"While it would be nice for IE to not get stuck like this, it would be much better for HTML authors to take a little more time and not put badly formatted junk into their sites."

Wow. Just... wow.

I've ran into this bug before with a dotted border along with a border-radius on an element. This bugged the hell out of me and I was in contact with a friend from the IE team who was also debugging it. Finally isolated it to a small piece of code http://pastebin.com/w7YGvgWs

Apparently this is actually a browser hang and not actually a crash. The friend reported it internally, but he said they probably wouldn't actually fix it in IE9 since it wasn't a crash and wasn't exploitable.

So, yes, the IE team is fully aware of this bug.

Would be useful if there's a simple testcase page for this.

Of your fixes, did you need to do all of them or was any one on its own suffice to fix the problem?

Microcrap strikes again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com