Hulk smash

How bad is this: I finally tracked down a problem some IE users were having with sirens3.com, and discovered that it’s caused by code I put on the site to work around other IE deficiencies.

For those who care, the problem seems to be related to using ECMAScript to traverse and modify the DOM. There are vague references to this all over the ‘net–the symptom is that IE will load a page, then pop up an error dialog reading Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://example.com. Operation aborted.–but nothing in the way of official confirmation, or even acknowledgement, of the issue by Microsoft.

There is something resembling unofficial confirmation in a Microsoft Web Team Q&A from 2001:

Although we don’t fully understand the reason behind the error you are seeing… calling setTimeout to force the document update to occur after the onreadystate event handler has exited resolves the problem. This behavior is probably because you are modifying the document from within the onreadystate event handler.

Published by

9 thoughts on “Hulk smash

  1. I found your site via Google. I am by no means technical at all but the problem you are describing is exactly what is happening to my browser. Do you know of any solution? It appears to occur with various sites. I am on XP pro and have the latest IE version. Any help would be great.

    Thanks.

  2. I don’t think there’s an IE fix available, Brandon. I’ve tried in the most recent versions and the problem is still there; the only “fixes” I’m aware of are to turn off scripting entirely or get the webmaster to remove the code from the website you want to get to.

  3. Pingback: NetWizard's Blog
  4. Pingback: NetWizard's Blog

Comments are closed.