prototype, script.aculo.us crashes IE6
At the moment I am finishing a project for a customer which involves displaying some data via barcharts and more detailed datacharts. The project is meant as a prototype / pilot project for a future bigger project and we wanted to use this oppurtunity to try out some different AJAX approaches. I opted to use the prototype framework along with script.acolu.us.
Everything seemed to work fine - W3C validation, IE6+7, Firefox 1.x+2, Safari, Opera etc., relatively small document/page sizes and so on. The customer was very satisfied especially since one of the new AJAX functions (based on the autocomplete function) provided an easy approach for users to find information which was otherwise a bit difficult to present.
Project was on time, on budget and everyone was happy - until.. one users IE6 crashes. Not just some minor thing.. It completely crashes iexplore.exe and kernel32.dll. Wow! Strange!
Ok - first off I wanted to check the build numbers on the different pc’s. Turns out that I got a couple of pc’s running the same build. However, these didn’t crash in fact everything ran smoothly. How marvelous! This turned my suspicion towards 3rd party plug-ins and after some googling I found a post on Aleksandar Vacic’s blog which mentioned that Text Ware’s QuickFind might be the problem, so today I went to the customer to check out the pc which crashed. Sure enough the QuickFind plug-in was present as part of a dictionary application. I then disabled it in IE and guess what? No more crashes.
Now this really leaves me in bit of a pickle. How far do you, as an independent consultant, go to solve these kinds of issues involving 3rd party BHO’s (Browser Helper Object). This problem will probably only affect a few users and taking into account the numerous amount of BHO’s available it might be impossible to make sure that the page doesn’t conflict with any of these.
UPDATE 04/27-07: Jakob Skjerning has written some more on the issue.