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.
...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).
It indeed crashes IE here... Windows 2K3, IE7
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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).
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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.
And here is a link to test it.
nemesis. Home of an experimental fe code.
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?
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
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?
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!
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).
If you include it in the body of an HTML mail message.