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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%.

15 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Tear in my eye by ceeam · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. If you don't speak Japanese.... by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...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).
    1. Re:If you don't speak Japanese.... by arkhan_jg · · Score: 4, Funny
      From slashdot.jp:

      When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?

      Heh. I can just imagine a 'tie-inspector' walking round making sure your business attire is up to standard, or else he unleashes an angry cat on you. Or maybe he tortures a cute kitten in front of you, not sure on that point.
      --
      Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
    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. Hmm.. by wumpus188 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  4. Bring Down A Website In Six Words by millwall · · Score: 4, Funny

    Post
    A
    Crappy
    Article
    On
    Slashdot

    1. Re:Bring Down A Website In Six Words by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 4, Funny

      Pacaos? That's an interesting acrostic. What does it mean?

      PacaOS is the operating system for Pacas - its a fork of rodentOS. HTH.

      --
      There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    2. Re:Bring Down A Website In Six Words by Odiumjunkie · · Score: 4, Funny

      I discovered a weird IE bug... there are six words that, when included on a webpage, stop IE ever being used on that computer again:

      get
      firefox
      from
      mozilla
      dot
      com

  5. Bring down my system in 13 chars. by BlackPignouf · · Score: 5, Funny

    :(){ :|:& };:

  6. 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.

  7. Re:How is this fucking useful ?? by Dragonslicer · · Score: 4, Funny

    200 HP? Is your shit a 20th level Barbarian or something?

  8. 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!
  9. 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.
  10. Also crashes Outlook... by eglass1 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  11. 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." ;)