Slashdot Mirror
Bring Down Internet Explorer In Six Words
Marcion writes "Some handy Japanese guy called Hamachiya discovered a bug in Internet Explorer. Under certain conditions, an asterisk when used as a wildcard can crash IE as soon as the user attempts to go to another page." The article claims the "five HTML tags and a CSS declaration" crash IE7 as well as IE6, but I couldn't get IE7 to fail. This page says that as of June, IE6 was at about 37% market share and IE7 under 20%.
I didn't think I'll see the day when browser crashing on something would be a newsworthy item. We - the industry - have made improvements in the last years I guess.
It would only bring the internet down if they were words we could post anywhere.
The Web 2.0 Apocalypse would be something to behold.
...then here's a word perfect translation of that article (courtesy of Babelfish).
Erm... then again, maybe not.
(If you liked that translation, you might enjoy Babelfish's attempt at Slashdot.jp.)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I tend to use http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php more than the w3schools stats, they're usually more accurate since w3schools has a very specific audience.
It indeed crashes IE here... Windows 2K3, IE7
Post
A
Crappy
Article
On
Slashdot
Who uses IE6 anyway? It's either Firefox or IE7.
And we bring down a site from a link in the OP.
It takes a few seconds to crash after the new tab is opened; that's enough time to type in an auto-completed URL and have it start loading. Strange thing about this is that even though Windows shows the standard "crashed" dialog box for IE, beneath that I can still see (e.g.) Slashdot continue to load in the background until I dismiss the dialog.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I is AC. I install MS VISta. It got IE. It good for look at porn. Problem PORN got Not god virus On it and IE not work. Jhow can you help me? I here this thing called linox solve? How virus not get hit? HATIGN@! computer STD. Me loves MSN +.
> as of June, IE6 was at about 37% market share
:(){ :|:& };:
Anyone feels like explaining what characters this is all about? Page in article is, liek, down.
That's seven words!
You can crash IE? Really? With a webpage? Who would have thought?
Seriously, here's a phone. Call someone who cares. Or at least isn't surprised. Or at least thinks it's newsworthy.
I don't care if I have to wave karma goodbye now, but sensibly, is there an event running today that tries to see how many really uninteresting, uninspired and utterly pointless "news" can make it to the front page on a single day? Yes, it's possible to crash IE. Hey, breaking news, you can even crash it in a way that allows you to execute arbitrary code. Wow. Teh horrorz.
This ain't news. It may be a new hole detected, but could we at least get less lurid subject lines that sound like it's the end of the world? How about "new bug in IE detected"? It would have been at least as accurate and more objective. You might get the same "duh, no kidding" replies, but at least people wouldn't make fun of you for making something trivial as an IE bug sound like it's the end of the internet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
* {position:relative}
</style><table><input></table>
When your shit has more than 200HP then it's probably useful to know the temperature
which is totally what she said
Dr.Who: I can bring down your administration in one word. Prime Minister: One word. Even you aren't capable of that. Dr.Who: Okay, six words. Dr.Who (wispers to aid): Don't you think she looks tired?
huzzah!
DAMN YOU SLASHDOT!
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Alt-F4 gets rid of it much more quickly, and doesn't rely on a Japanese website not having been /.ed.
I'm sure there are bugs in most browsers which can cause them to crash or not work properly. I know that loading up AOL webmail in Firefox will cause it to crash, not sure why though.
/. because the poster expects a tirade of "I hate M$" style comments, there is nothing particularly interesting about the news item and I'm sure it will get fixed in due course. Clearly the html required to cause the crash is not prevalent across the web else it would have been discovered sooner.
The point is, this article has been posted on
If this was digg, we could bury this post, and I for one would do so.
Using the Slashdot exploit, we can take down a server with one link!
The shock of this story has left me nearly speechless. A bug that causes a browser to crash? A story so lame this early in the morning? How can these things be?
Error:
MSFT should try to fix the bug that is crashing IE, because crashes in IE have a tendency to become a remote execution bug later. But still, no point in bashing MSFT on this issue. Browsers crashing on malformed input is well known. Firefox, my fav and only browser, too crashes often on malformed input. There is this thing called fuzzing, sending deliberately malformed input to the browser and see what happens. Firefox used to crash more often than IE under fuzzing. Now they provide fuzzing tools for their testers to strengthen mozilla products.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"handy"???
Do I have to be Japanese or American to understand that? Or do you mean a German cellphone?
Independence Day
well let us not forget that many things can crash firefox too.. especially in linux.. firefox simply disappears sometimes with no crash analysis or anything.. but regardless, internet explorer users need to trash IE6 right now.. it amazes me that people still use it.. i know for some it is required for development reasons and certain programs need it as well.. but that's no excuse for the rest of people out there too lazy or ignorant to install a stable and more secure newer version of IE.. i personally think IE7 is a freakin' great browser from the perspective of a user who uses both FF2 and IE on a regular basis in a shlew of different OS's..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
In 48 slashdot comments or less.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
TFA's servers aren't responding at the moment, so this might be included, but has anyone tried this with non-IE programs which use the Trident layout engine?
If it's Trident that's bringing down IE, then you're looking at HTML code that could also bring down Windows Media Player, several versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, MSN Messenger, Steam (from Valve), and other applications which use it to render web pages. I think at least some versions of Winamp used trident as well, but I'm not sure about that.
200 HP? Is your shit a 20th level Barbarian or something?
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/default.aspx
I won't speculate on the accuracy of these sites but it's interesting to compare the w3 statistics with the hitslink.com statistics. Linux for example gets twice the share on the w3 counter as on the hitslink.com site. Vista gets fewer hits on the w3 counter than on the hitslink.com site, it's currently standing at 5,4%, I thought it would be in more widespread use by now. The older Macs are completely missing from the w3 counter although I know for a fact that loads of people are still using them.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Yeah, but don't you think w3schools would be a bit biased? W3schools is a site full of tutorials and information for developers. Developers tend to prefer FireFox due to its robust plugin system and some of the excellent plugins for that system (Firebug, Web Tools, etc.) so I'm not surprised that FireFox has a higher rate of use on such a site. In fact, I am surprised that it's not higher!
Nothing to see here, move along.
Actually my warrior has closer to 3000HP, but I probably play a different game to you ;)
which is totally what she said
However, it's misleading to call these "Engrish", as that normally refers to the use of bad English (or even pseudo-English) by the Japanese.
By contrast, this is a quaint auto-translation of correctly-written Japanese. Okay, so the "cute" tone is probably down to the differences between Japanese language and culture as well... but it's still not Engrish per se.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It's made by Microsoft.
Six words? Please.
As any pimply-faced 14 year old surfing the web alone in his bedroom could've told you, all it takes is your Mom unexpectedly calling your name from right outside your door to cause IE to be shut down immediately.
Easy: Hi Slashdotters. Click here! Free porn!
If the point of this item is to point out bugs in IE it isn't alone. I crashed a large Epiphany session with a segmentation violation a couple of days ago and its relatively easy to crash Firefox if you limit the amount of memory available using ulimit (Firefox doesn't catch "early" C++ memory allocation failures and handle them gracefully). Firefox also has the infamous "window unexpectedly destroyed" bug (#263160) for ~3 years (which will crash the browser if you attempt to close the untitled window).
I suspect all of the Mozilla based browsers will effectively die if one throws enough "heavyweight" pages at them (i.e. those which are activity heavy [because there isn't a Javascript/Active HTML/Animated GIF scheduler]) or run out of swap space (again because memory allocation failures are not handled gracefully).
IMO, developers place too much emphasis on feature enhancements rather than making the existing browsers run reliably (bugs shouldn't linger for 3 years), with a minimal machine footprint (Netscape 4.7x required significantly less memory than Firefox) and effective priority scheduling of the "top" window (user responsiveness).
Six words to bring down IE: Use FireFox to browse the web
A badly formed INPUT tag has been known to take down IE since at least 2003.
Bigger news is why is it still there?
If you include it in the body of an HTML mail message.
"It is the report red sandal wood at Microsoft?"
Some things just stand on their own.
Why would I need to know the temperature of my Blissey?
*looks up Blissey on google*
In case it cooks its egg by mistake
which is totally what she said
Big deal. I can crash Safari 2.0.4 in two clicks. Enable Slashdot's new discussion system and click on a 'Reply to This' link. Press the Back button. Crash.
Yup, doesn't crash IE 5.2.3 for Mac OS X.
-- Boycott Shell
Thank you for wasting everyone's time.
Don't you think it looks tired?
Here I was all excited because I thought it was a writing contest to insult IE in 6 words. My mind was all ramped up for creativity. Now I have the mental equivalent of blue balls ...
Konqueror can be downed just by going to www.cnn.com.
On Ubuntu, with ies4linux, it crashes ie6 but not ie7.
http://24.29.222.112/ Why? Has something bad happened to my 'puter as a result?
"There is no more pr0n here."
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think this article pretty much sums up all of the juvenility and the lack of sophistication and intelligence of the slashdot community. To think it is somehow useful to crash the browser of someone visiting your website is to be a complete moron and a jackass... the whole "I Hate M$" thing was cute for a while, but its time to grow the fuck up for a lot of you people.
Go to the link to W3Schools in the parent article, search for the O/S stats, they show overall Linux use DECLINING?
Last I checked, a single Javascript command was enough to crash IE, and I think it works in IE7 as well as IE6:
for (x in document.write) { document.write(x);}
Was a great prank (ie, a sig link saying "IE USERS DON'T CLICK HERE"). Heh.
*{position:relative}
Seven words. If you count by distinct words then there are 5. Where did 6 come from??
Type in www.microsoft.com and see it crash konqueror (atleast it used to crash with certain versions).
It's easier than introspection, huh? Dipshits.
1. *
2. {
3. position
4. :
5. relative
6. }
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
1. <style> />
2. *{position:relative}
3. </style>
4. <table>
5. <input
6. </table>
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
"Doesn't it look tired these days?"
For those of you researching bug #263160, click on the link provided.
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
That asterisk is trouble for everyone now.
I can't STOP Firefox from crashing and somehow THIS is news?!?
WTH?
We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons, and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things: the 14 words to make someone fall in love with you forever, 7 words to make them go without pain, 6 words to bring down Internet Explorer, how to say good-bye to a friend who is dying, how to be poor, how to be rich, how to rediscover dreams when the world has stolen them from you.
Elric, The Techno-Mage
The Geometry of Shadows, Babylon 5
*yawn*
Wake me up when someone can count the number of bytes it takes on both hands.
Funny, I read it as "Horsepower".
This is what happens when you implement stuff by adding hack on top of a hack (CSS on top of "magic" HTML elements) instead of refactoring old crap and using proper approach (all display handled by CSS only).
The six words are, "don't you think she looks tired?"
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
The Power of Christ Compels You?
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
Just curious, are there any figures which compare security issues for KHTML, Webkit, Gecko, Opera, etc.? I am guessing that bug trackers alone would be incredibly skewed towards the most-used engines, and statistical methods tend to own me.
Well, security holes and crashes are somewhat orthogonal to each other. In systems where instruction space is separate from and protected from data space and the kernel space is separate from the user space it isn't clear how bad security can get in practice. Browsers I suspect are more vulnerable if one has plugins that can gain access to the user data space (form entry strings, user files, etc.). Installation of any binary packages is problematic (the greatest risk in an open source world would be compromised mirrors IMO).
/. readers.
There is a lot of attention on (and tracking of) potential security holes (buffer overflows, etc.) and differences between such holes in IE vs. Firefox, rates of security patches in various closed source systems vs. open source systems (and then distribution through open source distributors) -- but from someone on the outside, such as myself, there seems to be a lot of handwaving and very little detail on how real problems are put into web sites or emails and infect "real" protected user systems (which Unix/Linux/BSD systems have always tended to be) and which Windows (e.g. Vista) is slowly becoming. I suspect the real security experts know how one might make such attempts (root kits, etc.) but no "real world" "real risk" statistics seem to be available even for people who are regular
* p:first-letter { padding: 1em; }
</style>
<div>
<p><a href="http://www.positioniseverything.net">MSIE sucks</a></p>
</div>
An old joke I discovered while creating some webpage.
Which is as it was intended (obviously)
which is totally what she said
It should be noted, that the page lists both IE7 and IE6 percentages. IE's total market with a combined IE6/7 is 57%.
it's been a while since anyone mentioned the malformed tag as a problem3 -04-20/2003-04-26/0
;)
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/319360/200
Would all the anti IE folks please put this on their site immediately so I don't have to spend time on them
Many crashes are due to misbehaving plugins. Due to Mozilla plugin architecture, there's nothing we can do about this. (However, an experimental WebKit back-end was recently added to Epiphany.)
I don't remember. It may have filed it and I may have received a note that it didn't contain enough information. Bug reports without full symbol traceback information are pretty useless most of the time. I'm in the process of rebuilding all of the latest libraries with debugging but thats always a multi-day process unfortunately (and not one that I would guess the average user would undertake). If one gets a SEGV after running the browser a couple of days in the middle of a complex session its probably a memory corruption problem -- and likely only able to be debugged by a few core developers who understand everything thats in the heap. I don't use a lot of Epiphany plugins and generally ditched most of my Firefox plugins because they contributed to heap fragmentation/memory loss (even the Flash player from Adobe since that tended to fault). I'll be leaning towards the first browser that gets a robust bookmark system as neither Epiphany nor Firefox (2.0 *or* 3.0a7pre) are anything I'd consider to be worthy of the label "production".
Out of curiosity, what would it take for you to consider a bookmark system "robust"?