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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%.

4 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Is it crashed or not? by Dogtanian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It indeed crashes IE here... Windows 2K3, IE7 I'm using IE7 bog-standard Windows XP with SP2, and it "crashed" in the manner described for me too. Remember that (as the article states) you have to open a new tab.

    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).
  2. html source is: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    1. Re:html source is: by nschubach · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And VS2005 puts the problem somewhere around here...

      mshtml.dll! 7dcaac6e() mov eax,dword ptr [ecx+4]

      7DCAAC6C nop
      7DCAAC6D nop
      7DCAAC6E mov eax,dword ptr [ecx+4]
      7DCAAC71 test al,1
      7DCAAC73 jne 7DCB3229
      7DCAAC79 and eax,2
      7DCAAC7C ret
      7DCAAC7D nop

      Not that I have any clue what that means since I never learned assembly :p

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  3. Common to Trident? by Stefanwulf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.