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Question

Why does this website freeze in IE 7 but not in any other browser?

Answer 1

+3 A:

You need to cut down the site piece by piece and isolate the exact cause of the lock up.

Spencer Ruport 2010-03-02 19:26:43

+1 Because it's the best advice.

Robusto 2010-03-02 19:31:50

Alright, I'll isolate the problem and repost.

thinkswan 2010-03-02 20:12:21

Answer 2

A:

My guess would be that there is an AJAX call that is not getting to the correct ReadyState for some reason.

Jacob G 2010-03-02 19:33:30

There is no AJAX happening during the page load. The only AJAX call is when the Login link at the bottom of the page is clicked.

thinkswan 2010-03-02 20:12:51

As AJAX calls are (usually, by design) asynchronous, they just wouldn't lock a browser. The only thing that would happen is that the `onreadystatechange` event listener will not be called for a long time, at least not with `readyState==4`.

Marcel Korpel 2010-03-02 22:02:28

I think that you're assuming implementation... It could be a Do loop checking the readystate on the xmlhttp object which could, in fact, lock the browser. Irrelevant at this point as it appears the problem has been solved.

Jacob G 2010-03-02 23:04:03

That's true, but when would you write a `do` loop doing that? I really wonder this, could you give a short explanation?

Marcel Korpel 2010-03-03 02:21:02

I'm just thinking of a naive, synchronous implementation. It's stuck in my head simply because I had a developer at my last job write code like that that locked up a site in Safari b/c the readystate sequence is a little different than in other browsers.

Jacob G 2010-03-03 14:13:13

Interesting, I didn't know about that. You mean issues like on http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/09/xmlhttp_notes_r_2.html ?

Marcel Korpel 2010-03-03 18:29:53

Yup, exactly like that.

Jacob G 2010-03-03 18:52:29

Answer 3

+2 A:

Alright, I isolated the offensive code to this:

<div class='partsLevel1'> 
  <h3><span class='floatLeft'>Box Parts (0)</h3> 
</div>

Clearly this is a simple blunder on my part by forgetting to close the <span> tag. I've quite surprised this actually freezes IE though. That doesn't seem like a very graceful failure on their part.

It looks like when IE gets multiple floated elements that remain unclosed, it just locks up entirely.

And the reason I have a seemingly unnecessary <span> inside of a <h3> element is because when you're logged in, there are a few administrative links that are floated right.

Thanks for your help everyone.

thinkswan 2010-03-02 20:24:39

Looks like it could have been caught with an XML validation pass.

Paggas 2010-03-02 20:43:23

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Why does this website freeze in IE 7 but not in any other browser?

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