I noticed the past several days some other WordPress blogs have been acting funny in Internet Explorer. Their pages would load and render in the browser, but then a “page cannot be loaded” pops up and the page disappears.
Saw this on a Wired feed, this apparently explains it.
A number of web sites that use SiteMeter tracking code to monitor the number of visitors to their site are reporting that the code is causing Internet Explorer browsers to crash when users visit their sites.
and a good, enlightening comment from ‘Alexander’ in the comments section:
Test, test test!
SiteMeter hit a bug in IE where the DOM fails to render if you attempt to attach new nodes before the previous cascade has completed.
In SiteMeter’s defense, this is a fairly abstruse bug if you’re not intimately familiar with IE. However, they really should have tested their code before rolling out this update, bugs of this magnitude are very easy to spot. It sucks for them that one web-dev has just endangered their continued growth and damaged their good name.
On the off-chance that someone from SiteMeter reads this, please consider implementing regression testing for all browsers with significant market share. Something along the lines of Yahoo’s Graded Browser Support: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/index.html#history gives excellent guidelines for QA to work from.