IE features superior QA
In a message to BugTraq, Michal Zalewski posts the results of a comparison of IE 6.0, Firefox, Netscape, Opera, and Linx’s behavior on invalid markup and malformed HTML:
“All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn’t parse.”
See Larry Osterman and Slashdot for more information about this story. Also, here is an image of the Firefox crash.
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 14th, 2004 at 6:18 pm and is tagged with memory exhaustion, memory corruption, null pointer, internet explorer, osterman, slashdot, linx, netscape, markup, qa, crash, ie 6, opera, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on November 12th, 2004 at 12:51 pm
This is because IE is made to handle the code incorrectly to begin with and doesn’t conform even remotely properly to the standards. I use IE and Firefox so I can’t be called really biased in this.
on November 12th, 2004 at 1:23 pm
No. It means IE has a better parser than other browsers out there. There are no standards for handling completely garbage input. I have a feeling you don’t know what you’re talking about….
on November 19th, 2004 at 6:31 am
Actually, it doesn’t really mean that IE is a better parser. As you said, there aren’t really any standards for garbage input. It just means that IE is a more liberal parser. You would argue that is a good thing. Others will argue it is a bad thing.
I don’t think there is any doubt that you have a better chance of displaying a garbage page if you use IE… of course it is also true that you are more likely to create a garbage page if you code specifically for IE, as you won’t realize you’ve erred.
on July 20th, 2005 at 2:11 am
you might want to look at the bottom of this post and notice that he indeed did make IE crash as well. He replys to his own post. Just because one person couldn’t find a way to crash it, doesn’t mean it can’t crash. Later.