I'm the author that discovered this bug - and went way out of my way to tell the Internet Explorer team about it. I uncovered the error while working on a client's SharePoint site and figuring out why a certain page always caused their computer to freeze up.<p>The most amazing part of this exercise has been analyzing the traffic trends. This page gets a crazy amount of traffic in Japan and China - I still can't figure out why.<p>It has also been a remarkable insight into the dysfunction that is Microsoft; I'll hear from some random Microsoft employee twice a year who became aware of the site and wants to fix it, after pointing to the closed "not a bug" thread on MSDN they all vanish (apparently keenly aware of how atrocious the IE team reacts to external interest/support.)
I think the most shocking thing is when you follow it through to the MSDN bug discussion—and you find people blaming the author for writing invalid HTML.<p>Apparently IE doesn’t need to follow the robustness principle. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle</a>
=== Evil Idea ===<p>Everyone create a script on all your websites that randomly implements this bug on some but not all pages (definitely not landing & home pages) then watch as little by little millions of users think their IE is broken and messed up and start using other browsers. A few sites alone wouldn't make a difference but over the course of its life even websites with normal amounts of traffic build up 30,000 unique visitors after a few years. Combined that would do some damage to IE's stability. Yes it's evil because you're deliberately crashing innocent people's browsers but aren't they evil/foolish for deliberately using IE and making us work harder to support it?<p>Sometimes users have to learn things the hard way.
Wow. I guess Microsoft is still the pinata.<p>I write web-based software. Every day.<p>I have made every browser crash and become completely non-responsive, many times over. Chrome. Firefox. Opera. All of them.<p>Now, this is mostly through JavaScript, when I do something stupid by manipulating the DOM the wrong way or some other funny thing. I fix it and keep going. Because breaking the browser is bad.<p>Want to report it to the vendor? Great. Fine. Making a website dedicated to the crash? Waaaay too much time on your hands.
I don't see why it's such a big deal. Ya I mean it's kind of a dumb thing to cause a browser to crash, but I am sure any browser has a dumb thing here or there that will cause a crash.<p>Seems like we're just trying to pick on IE here.
Is this a big deal? It's amusing that it is such a simple chunk of HTML, but I was under the impression that it's not terribly difficult to DoS the average browser.<p>I accidentally discovered some very simple HTML that reliably crashes Outlook whenever you try to view or preview the message a while back. I reported it and I think they eventually fixed it.
I can't be the only one that saw this, and immediately thought "Wrap this in some browser detection code, and display it in a tiny iframe if you're using an inferior browser..."<p>No? Anyone? Guess I'm wearing a black hat today.
I accidentally created another bug that also crashes every single version of internet explorer. It's related to putting a filter: progID into an element modified by javascript.
>This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.<p>That headline sounds disingenuous and somewhat flamebaity given that 10 is still in development <i>and</i> the latest public version available on Windows 8 does not crash.
This is indeed shocking. I cannot recall a time in which I was subjected to using software which contained a bug. I sincerely hope this does not become a trend.