Seven easy ways to crash Internet Explorer 6 [I Heart Internets]

If you’ve visited IHC using Internet Explorer 6, you’ve probably noticed that this site is broken in IE6 and it’s supposed to be that way. Because IE6 is the dark evil bane on the Internet experience. IE6’s heart is full of pain and hate and it was designed by retarded capuchin monkeys to be the ultimate standards non-complient browsing experience.
So IE6 users who visit IHC, you can eat a bowl of dicks until you get a real browser. That’s the official line and I’m sticking with it. You can get Firefox, hell even IE7 is half-decent. Just get the fuck off IE6. Get with the modern world.
What’s well known is that IE6 is so much a piece of shit that it can easily crashed with a single short bit of HTML that other browsers either render correctly or ignore if its invalid. So here we have the 7 great ways to easily crash Internet Explorer 6. These require putting these pieces of code in a web page which when visited by some dickhead who is using IE6 will crash the browser. Some of these work in IE7, but not all.
1. <STYLE>@;/*’
How it works: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a technology that allows Web authors to have increased control of the design and interaction of their Web pages. The issue arises when IE is presented a STYLE tag followed by a sequence of comment character /* that is not terminated, which triggers IE to perform an invalid memory copy operation. Link
Example: Right here (if you’re using any version of IE, save what you’re doing first)
2. <input type crash>
How it works: It’s a null pointer overwrite that will crash any Microsoft program that uses the shlwapi.dll library to render web code, which includes IE, Outlook and FrontPage. The word “crash” is just in there for effect, but it could be anything– “calamari”, “dingleberry” or “microsoft sucks”. Link for more info.
3. <body onLoad=”window()”>
How it works: The bug occurs because Internet Explorer can’t handle a call to a JavaScript-function with the name of the “window”-object. The bug was fixed in an earlier version. But it works again. This can be avoided by turning off “Active Scripting” in the IE options menu. Link for more info.
4. <style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input></table>
How it works: This is similiar in a way to input type, just another way around it. It causes a fatal error in mshtml.dll.
Example: Right here if you’re brave.
5. Event Handler Crash
How it works: This vulnerability can be triggered by specifying more than a couple thousand script action handlers (such as onLoad, onMouseMove, etc) for any single HTML tag. Due to a programming error, MSIE will then attempt to write memory array out of bounds, at an offset corresponding to the ID of the script action handler multiplied by 4 (due to 32-bit address clipping, the result is a small positive integer). Link for more info.
6. <script>for (x in document.write) { document.write(x);}</script>
How it works: Once again, throws an exception into a dll. Link for more info.
Example: Right here. Non-IE browsers are safe. Yay.
7. Ordered List Crash
How it works: The CSS that was used to style the unordered list into a menu is commonly used by most standards-based designers. It involves making the list item element display inline, and making the anchor element display as a block and floating it left. This creates a horizontal list of menu items which can then be assigned more style attributes. IE6 apparently doesn’t support XHTML 1.1 and it causes it to crap its pants. Link for more info.
Example: Right here, bub.
This isn’t by any means a complete list. There’s thousands of ways to crash IE6, these are just some of the easiest. XHTML, Java Applets, corrupted image files– all these things can make IE6 wish it were never born. The moral of the story? Get a real browser.
Email This Post
Print This Post
*In case you're neither, you must be logged in or registered to save an article as a favorite.




























The ultimate guide to WoW non-combat pets [IHC and WoW]




Comment by Mark on 16 April 2008:
Man I would love to get another browser but I am stuck on a Pentium 2 (266mhz) Compaq Digital PC with Windows NT 4.0. The president of my company refuses to upgrade any of our tech from prehistoric to at least stone age and has administrative restrictions turned all the way up so I can’t download or install anything because he is comfortable with what we have. I can’t even use flash. Granted I can only surf on lunch breaks or after hours but still. I have been given computers newer than this from family just to screw around with.
Comment by cranberryzero on 16 April 2008:
that’s too bad… i hope then you’re surfing IHC at home on a far superior browser.
Comment by Talon on 22 April 2008:
Lol I’m writing this in IE6 now. So much for the site being broken. ;D
Comment by cranberryzero on 22 April 2008:
well geez talon it doesn’t goatse you or anything, though i can do that. i just don’t bother to cross browser it at all. i let ie6 stew in its own faulty box model malarky.