9 ms·
This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
- kennu 14y agoDidn't crash IE10.0.8400.0 in Windows 8 Release Preview 64-bit.
- ZombieDisco 14y agoCan confirm this!
- gouranga 14y agoCrashes tab in IE9 9.0.7 Win7 x64. That's it. The rest of the browser is fine.
- zacharyvoase 14y agoI think the most shocking thing is when you follow it through to the MSDN bug discussion—and you find people blaming the author for writing invalid HTML. Apparently IE doesn’t need to follow the robustness principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
- haclifford 14y agoI agree, it's unbelievable. End users don't care about incorrect markup, they care about their browser hanging.
- DrJokepu 14y agoObviously this is a bug in IE that needs to be fixed and it's Microsoft's responsibility to ensure that their browser doesn't crash in invalid input, but end users don't actually care about the browser either (they don't even know what a browser is), they care about your site crashing.
- mibbitier 14y agoThat's incorrect. If your TV crashed would you blame the TV program you were watching at the time? People know the difference between software and content. Content should never be able to crash software.
- DrJokepu 14y agoI agree with you in that content should never be able to crash software. I disagree with you TV example, however. If the same TV show repeatedly crashed one of the most popular TV models, consumers would blame the show.
- omarrr 14y agowell, that would be stupid
- duaneb 14y agoNot necessarily - I don't understand how software interacts with, for example, digital cable. I've seen certain channels crash my cable box before. It wouldn't be that surprising to see a certain show reliably crash the cable box.
- tjic 14y agoA topic very much like this one makes up a chapter in the wonderful book Godel, Escher, Bach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach Two characters are in a race: one to build an impervious record player, the other to design a record that - when played - sets up feedback in the record player sufficient to destroy it. It's a stunningly simple intro to a fairly deep topic: NP completeness, input validation, etc.
- danielweber 14y agoI had an episode of a TV show on videotape that literally crashed my TV. I'm not kidding. Whenever the show got to a certain point the TV would turn off. I'm 99% sure that it was something invalid in the closed captioning.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Xcelerate 14y agoI agree. There is no combination of text that should cause a browser to crash. Why the people in the discussion were blaming the HTML markup is beyond me.
- ExxKA 14y agoAgree. It's a horrible read. Good thing their marketing department hasn't caught up with this... yet
- MichaelGG 14y agoThis isn't a case of "Robustness principle". Not crashing on invalid input is just plain old decent programming, not to mention secure programming. Programs should not crash on invalid inputs, period. "Robustness" as in the robustness principle refers to trying to actually process invalid data and go make a guess at what the functionality should be. In fact, you can make quite a case that "robustness" as defined that way is responsible for the horrible mess that HTML and cross-browser compatibility is these days. For instance, if you improperly close tags, or overlap tags, IE (and others I assume) will dutifully go about trying to figure out what you meant: being very "robust" in their interpretation of input outside the spec. By implementing behaviour outside the spec (being "robust"), you are implicitly extending the spec, and every other browser has to implement unspecified behaviour in the same way.
- Retric 14y agoReminds me of one of my first jobs. I needed to convert some data into a odd file format based on 100 or so pages of documentation and upload it to an FTP. Problem was the first version I wrote caused their system to crash... Fun times.
- petitmiam 14y agoAt uni in a software testing subject I was given an assignment to read various input files (some valid, some invalid). If your program crashes, you would get 0 marks. It made for a stressful assignment execution day, but it was a good lesson.
- Mythbusters 14y agoIt does not crash the IE build that came with the RC of windows 8. So probably all the comments and the page should use a past tense?
- eli 14y agoIs this a big deal? It's amusing that it is such a simple chunk of HTML, but I was under the impression that it's not terribly difficult to DoS the average browser. I accidentally discovered some very simple HTML that reliably crashes Outlook whenever you try to view or preview the message a while back. I reported it and I think they eventually fixed it.
- pyre 14y ago> I reported it and I think they eventually fixed it. If you follow through to the MSDN discussion, it is from 2009. So "eventually fixed it" could apply in this case, only because the timescale is unbounded, but waiting years for a fix seems unreasonable.
- sp332 14y agoBugfixes are subject to the Halting problem :)
- Estragon 14y agoHow do you DoS chrome?
- eswangren 14y agoFacebook seems to have no problem crashing Chrome on my three machines.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- eli 14y agoI don't know. Maybe Google is so good it's impossible (or at least limited to one tab). But I suspect it's still possible if I'm allowed to use commonly installed plugins. I think I could make a Java applet that consistently crashes.
- salsayarroz 14y agoWhat was the problem? was it the unclosed <form> tag?
- paulbjensen 14y agoWould love to know too, can't have been as ironic as the <input type="crash"> bug.
- Isofarro 14y agoIt was just: <input type crash> as I recall - not specifying a value for type.
- jarito 14y agoLooks like the crash doesn't happen if you provide the </form> tag, so that looks like it. Edit with more info: Looks like removing any of the markup prevents the crash. "Removing the CSS, the div, the table, etc all cause this code to not crash IE"
- acqq 14y agoThe minimal variant with which I repeated the crash was: <style type="text/css"> #a { margin: 0 10px 10px; } #b { width: 100%; } </style> <table> <tr> <td> <div id="a"> <form id="b"> <input type="text" name="test"/> </div> </td> <td width="1"> </td> </tr> </table> Removing the second td is enough to make the html not crashing on IE 9. The "crash" manifests itself in some kind of an infinite loop (one thread jumps to 100% CPU and stays so). Then the "recovery" mechanisms kick in, reloading the page, blocking again... :) Can anybody reduce it even more?
- itcmcgrath 14y agoRemoving the TR's produces the same results. Change div to p still results in the crash, but removing that level entirely doesn't.
- rco8786 14y agoI don't see why it's such a big deal. Ya I mean it's kind of a dumb thing to cause a browser to crash, but I am sure any browser has a dumb thing here or there that will cause a crash. Seems like we're just trying to pick on IE here.
- BobPalmer 14y agoI'd agree. On a side note, took me about ten seconds of googling to find HTML/Javascript that reliably crashes firefox (but does not crash IE8). I expect Chrome would have similar cases where there could be something that causes crashes (at least, there are bug reports asserting this). (FYI here's some HTML/JS for the Firefox bug... Resizing the browser caused the issue to manifest in Win7 with FF 13.0.1:) <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml> http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml> <head> <title>Test</title> <script type="text/javascript"> window.onresize = function () { alert("gg"); }; </script> </head> <body> </body> </html> (edited to acknowledge that this is a JS bug). And for the downvotes, at least provide a reason and/or a discussion.
- jonny_eh 14y agoWhile close, it's a bit different since JS is needed to crash the browser. The interesting thing about the IE bug is that no JS is required.
- gcp 14y agoKnown for a year with no fix in sight :( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=626963 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=626963
- kyberias 14y agoAre people really downvoting because you pointed out that other browsers have bugs too? Amazing!
- khuey 14y agoUh yeah, it's really easy to find code that crashes browsers with open bug trackers. Just go search them.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoOn IE 9 on Windows 7 it just causes the tab to load forever. Maybe the bug has been patched?
- philbarr 14y agopatched to still work really badly?
- simonsarris 14y agoI have the same setup and clicked "recover" when the option came up, and it crashed the browser then. IE9 is still open, but the cursor is stuck on <--> and clicking anywhere does nothing. I don't even get the "this program has stopped responding" message. Closing it in any of the normal ways is failing, I had to do end task. Successive attempts to load the page don't even need for me to click anything for it to crash hard.
- bdonlan 14y agoNo crash on IE 9.0.8112.16421, update version 9.0.7, windows 7 64-bit.
- awa 14y agoIn IE 9.0.8112 (Win 2008R2) the tab is kinda stuck but the rest of the tabs work fine
- kyberias 14y agoDoes not crash IE10 on Release Preview 64-bit. Neither desktop or Metro version.
- ecaron 14y agoI'm the author that discovered this bug - and went way out of my way to tell the Internet Explorer team about it. I uncovered the error while working on a client's SharePoint site and figuring out why a certain page always caused their computer to freeze up. The most amazing part of this exercise has been analyzing the traffic trends. This page gets a crazy amount of traffic in Japan and China - I still can't figure out why. It has also been a remarkable insight into the dysfunction that is Microsoft; I'll hear from some random Microsoft employee twice a year who became aware of the site and wants to fix it, after pointing to the closed "not a bug" thread on MSDN they all vanish (apparently keenly aware of how atrocious the IE team reacts to external interest/support.)
- smarx 14y agoWhere is the bug report? I'd be curious to read the response from Microsoft. (The link on the page is just to a Google Group discussion, which doesn't appear to have participation from Microsoft.)
- ecaron 14y agohttps://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/554467/loading-page-with-unclosed-form-crashes-ie9-and-all-previous-versions https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/554467/loa...
- slajax 14y agoLive login required? Pffffft.
- pygy_ 14y agoAfter logging in, I get this: > Page Not Found > The content that you requested cannot be found or you do not have permission to view it. Did they remove the item?
- iamichi 14y agoSame here. Looks like they've deleted it. I couldn't find a cached copy of it either.
- Karunamon 14y agoI can't be the only one that saw this, and immediately thought "Wrap this in some browser detection code, and display it in a tiny iframe if you're using an inferior browser..." No? Anyone? Guess I'm wearing a black hat today.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoIf it only crashes IE, and you want to punish IE users, why bother wrapping it?
- AUmrysh 14y agoSo that you can embed it in all of your pages secretly and get users to switch from IE to pretty much any other browser that actually follows web standards for implementation.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoRight, but why write a wrapper that detects the browser for it? Just ... include it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cmelbye 14y agoCourse, the user will see it as your site that crashes the browser. Probably can't be good for conversions.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago>This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10. That headline sounds disingenuous and somewhat flamebaity given that 10 is still in development and the latest public version available on Windows 8 does not crash.
- pseudosavant 14y agoIt also doesn't crash IE9 on my Windows 7 PC or Windows Phone. I don't think most people have actually tried the page in IE9.
- Achshar 14y agoNot crashing win 8 consumer preview.
- almost 14y agoDoes stuff like this make any one else think of "I cannot by played on record player X" from Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach?
- Wilduck 14y agoIt shouldn't. The record and record player was an analogy for statements and formal systems of sufficient complexity. This example would be analogous if html/css formed a Turing complete system, and the job of a browser was to decide whether or not the markup for a given page halted. This is just an example of a fixable bug with rejecting what should be obviously invalid input. The corresponding analogy would be if the Crab's record player broke any time a particularly bad pop song came on. It could tell by looking at the song whether or not it would break, but the designers didn't bother to fix it because no one wants to listen to bad pop music anyway.
- almost 14y agoBut what about the tension between features (completeness of system? Or ability to reproduce any sound?) and robustness (lack of contradictions? No sounds that would cause its own destruction?) The analogy seems to fit there, enough to make me smile anyway :)
- maratd 14y agoWow. I guess Microsoft is still the pinata. I write web-based software. Every day. I have made every browser crash and become completely non-responsive, many times over. Chrome. Firefox. Opera. All of them. Now, this is mostly through JavaScript, when I do something stupid by manipulating the DOM the wrong way or some other funny thing. I fix it and keep going. Because breaking the browser is bad. Want to report it to the vendor? Great. Fine. Making a website dedicated to the crash? Waaaay too much time on your hands.
- acdha 14y agoI can say the same but there's a clear gap in how seriously the vendors take it: it's been a long time since I've crashed any browser other than IE. The closest I've come a couple of times was getting Firefox to use enough memory that I killed it rather than waiting for it to page. If you are crashing them as often as you claim, you should be filing security bug reports - every other browser team will respond quickly to non-Flash crashes.
- yuhong 14y agoAnd if the crash is a non-null access violation in IE, please report to MSRC. These do get fixed in the next security update.
- mkmcdonald 14y ago> I have made every browser crash and become completely non-responsive, many times over. Chrome. Firefox. Opera. All of them. Now, this is mostly through JavaScript, when I do something stupid by manipulating the DOM the wrong way or some other funny thing. I fix it and keep going. Because breaking the browser is bad. We have a winner. Want browsers to play nice? Write good code.
- ecaron 14y ago> Want to report it to the vendor? Great. Fine. Making a website dedicated to the crash? Waaaay too much time on your hands. Time to report bug to Microsoft: 30 minutes. Time to create website for bug: 4 minutes. #justsayin
- metrop0219 14y agoNo.... not at all. I just opened this in ie 10 fine. What's the point here?
- danba 14y agohttp://crashmyie.com http://crashmyie.com better
- eswangren 14y agoThis is indeed shocking. I cannot recall a time in which I was subjected to using software which contained a bug. I sincerely hope this does not become a trend.
- petitmiam 14y agoWho is subjecting you to use IE?
- arikrak 14y agoIt froze up Chrome on my PC for a few seconds also.
- ChrisNorstrom 14y ago=== Evil Idea === Everyone create a script on all your websites that randomly implements this bug on some but not all pages (definitely not landing & home pages) then watch as little by little millions of users think their IE is broken and messed up and start using other browsers. A few sites alone wouldn't make a difference but over the course of its life even websites with normal amounts of traffic build up 30,000 unique visitors after a few years. Combined that would do some damage to IE's stability. Yes it's evil because you're deliberately crashing innocent people's browsers but aren't they evil/foolish for deliberately using IE and making us work harder to support it? Sometimes users have to learn things the hard way.
- blackhole 14y agoI accidentally created another bug that also crashes every single version of internet explorer. It's related to putting a filter: progID into an element modified by javascript.
- wmboy 14y agoSo I just checked in IE9 and it works fine... (using 9.0.8112.16421)