My site crashes IE 7, where should I start to understand such a thing?

Question

I could use a bit of insight! I built a webpage in which I use a fair amount of jquery/flash and other somewhat hardcore layout tools. It was fine in local testing, works in IE 6 and 7 so I delivered it to the customer, who put it on a server and now it promptly crashes IE 7. (haven't tried IE 6 yet). I don't have any decent debugging tools, but crashing is pretty radical in any case. Any idea if just javascript can do this and how to tell it not to?

The site is hosted at www.functionprojects.com/brightoutcome, Cheers and thanks!

Answer 1

If you run iexplore.exe in a debugger, then load public symbols and then dump the stack with the k1000 command, you can at least get an idea from the function names where things are going horribly wrong. If you paste it here, we may be able to help more specifically.

Otherwise, you just have to start commenting out your script / JQuery until it stops crashing, and then narrow it down to something more specific.

Or provide a link to an example page that crashes for us to test.

Answer 2

Running your site in Firefox gives me javascript errors, as does running it in IE8. FF equipped with Firebug will lock down the error in FF

Error: $("#tabs").tabs is not a function
Source File: http://www.functionprojects.com/brightoutcome/
Line: 28

The errors in IE8 look like their coming as a result of flash calls to externalinterface, with a call to

document.getElementById("ESAS")

Which occurs in an anonymous function block that looks like:

try { document.getElementById("ESAS").SetReturnValue(__flash__toXML(amGetZoom(undefined,"02-10-2009","05-04-2009",undefined,undefined,undefined,undefined,undefined)) ); } catch (e) { document.getElementById("ESAS").SetReturnValue("<undefined/>"); }

Sometimes, externalinterface needs to wait a little while before trying to communicate with the DOM as the DOM may not be fully loaded before Flash kicks in.

Anyway, you'll need to fix all these errors.