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Bring Down Internet Explorer In Six Words

Posted by kdawson on from the don't-you-think-she-looks-tired dept.

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%.

11 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm.. by wumpus188 · · Score: 4, Informative

    It indeed crashes IE here... Windows 2K3, IE7

  2. Re:If you don't speak Japanese.... by Barny · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292245,00.html

    Ask and ye shall receive :)

    A bit anti-climactic really.

    --
    ...
    /me sighs
  3. Re:html source is: by derrida · · Score: 3, Informative

    And here is a link to test it.

    --
    nemesis. Home of an experimental fe code.
  4. IE Usage @ w3schools? by asylumx · · Score: 5, Informative

    as of June, IE6 was at about 37% market share and IE7 under 20%

    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!
  5. Re:Is it crashed or not? by Bacon+Bits · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not a crash, per se. It's a forced closure due to an illegal operation of one component of the browser with code in mshtml.dll.

    An exception was thrown that was not properly caught. The error is caused by improper error trapping. Otherwise, the browser would just render things improperly or claim there was an error on the page because it doesn't properly parse and render the style tag.

    --
    The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
  6. So? One can easily crash Firefox too... by bradbury · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  7. Also crashes Outlook... by eglass1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you include it in the body of an HTML mail message.

  8. Re:Is it crashed or not? by GooberToo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Pre-tell then, what is a crash?

    When an exception is thrown and is not properly caught. The error is caused by improper error trapping. This is a classic "crash." ;)

  9. Re:If you don't speak Japanese.... by uhmmmm · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's a quick translation I just did:

    Hello! Good afternoon!!!!!
    I stumbled across a browser crash, so today I'll tell you about it!

    Here it is!

    <style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input>< /table>

        Sample (If you're using IE, your browser will close! You have been warned!)

    It seems IE6 or programs using IE6 components will definitely crash!
    I haven't checked IE7 though!

    It seems to be when you have and input or select or such just below a table or tr or such,
    and you use the css wildcard * to set everything to position:relative.

    By the way, if the input has its style directly set to relative, it doesn't crash. What's up with that?
    I don't really get it, but it sure is interesting...!

    Anyone out there who loves Firefox or Opera should go spread this all over and decrease IE's market share!!!

  10. Re:Bring down my system in 13 chars. by bob.appleyard · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Bourne Shell, actually.

    --
    How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
  11. Re:No. You're kidding. Can't be. by InsaneGeek · · Score: 3, Informative

    > When was the last time you saw Firefox or Safari or Konquror able to be crashed with a malformed web page?

    Umm... 9 days ago?

    http://secunia.com/advisories/26201/

    The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error within the handling of system default URIs with registered URI handlers (e.g. "mailto", "news", "nntp", "snews", "telnet"). This can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands when a user e.g. using Firefox visits a malicious website with a specially crafted "mailto" URI containing a "%" character and ends in a certain extension (e.g. ".bat", ".cmd")

    This command would make firefox go "away"
    mailto:test%25../../../../windows/system32/tskill. exe firefox.cmd