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%.

Comments

Tear in my eye

[ceeam]

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.

Bring down my system in 13 chars.

[BlackPignouf]

:(){ :|:& };:

Re:If you don't speak Japanese....

[Barny]

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

Ask and ye shall receive :)

A bit anti-climactic really.

Common to Trident?

[Stefanwulf]

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.

IE Usage @ w3schools?

[asylumx]

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!

Re:Is it crashed or not?

[Bacon Bits]

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.