google analytics creates broken links for IE8

Question

We have been successfully running a Django site for a couple of years. We use the following (standard) google analytics code for most of our pages.

<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>

In Django the settings are such that we get an email every time there is a broken link. Recently, one of our users has been generating a lot of broken links that are related to google analytics. The error messages look similar to this (where apage is any url):

Referrer: http://ourwebsite.com/apage/
Requested URL: /apage/.google-analytics.com/ga.js
User agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) IP address: 127.0.0.1

Based on the error message, I suspect the problem is related to IE8 and some security settings or modes. I have tried running the Utilu IE Collection version of IE8 to reproduce the problem, but had no luck.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I'd guess at an operator precedence bug/quirk, as it looks that

('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www')

(at line 8 of your snippet) may be parsed as

('https:' == (document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www'))

which would evaluate to 'https:' == 'https://ssl' and to false,

whereas the correct intent seems to be

(('https:' == document.location.protocol) ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www')

What happens when you force the precedence with parentheses (see previous line)?