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This issue had a disproportionate effect upon disadvantaged individuals and groups ( poor, disabled, third world, charities, etc ) who do not have the option to move to OS X with their old slow hardware. All other legacy browsers have more serious disadvantages than Internet Explorer - see below.
From about 8 June 2007 until 15 June 2007 google.com searches consistently 'crashed' Internet Explorer (IE) on Macs. This happened every time with IE 5.1.7 on OS 9 and IE 5.2.3 on OS X. The situation for OS 9 was particularly serious as often the OS also crashed.
Many UK users will not have noticed this bug as google.com redirects to google.co.uk but, without the Google fix, these crashes would have been with us for a long time especially for Google forms on non-Google sites and historic URLs.
Try the following links:
Until fixed link 3 caused IE to hang indefinitely every time. This prevented IE from being used without a forced quit. This was more serious for OS 9, and earlier, than for OS X because other applications could not be used without forcing IE to quit. Repeated forced IE quits crashed the OS on about one occasion in ten causing potential loss of data in unsaved applications and random disk corruption. Whilst one or two IE forced quits are unlikely to cause any significant lasting damage repeated OS crashes can cause unpredictable and significant loss of disk data. It appears that the problem was restricted to Macs - perhaps because versions of IE beyond 5.x are not available for either OS 9 or OS X.
google.com delivers web pages dependent upon browser type. The code responsible for this was probably unaware of IE 5.1.7 for Mac OS or IE 5.2.3 for OS X and hence it may have delivered pages designed for another browser and/or OS. These google.com pages caused IE for the Mac to hang indefinitely. Early reports indicated that turning off either style sheets or frames, but not scripting, would stop the crashes.
Although Google pages contain much invalid html it was not easy to explain the above observations. There has, however, been a considerable history of IE vulnerabilities resulting from ill defined iframes. Furthermore the reported vulnerabilities are consistent with the serious data loss some experienced as a result of making repeated attempts to access google.com. With this in mind I played with the HTML, especially the iframe tags, and discovered that adding any white space between the </iframe> and <div> tags stopped the crashes. I had no explanation for this IE quirk but reported it here and directly to Google as the simplest and least risky modification that Google had ever had to consider. My later analysis showed that putting content between the div tags or adding a doctype declaration also stopped the crashes.
Google could replace the iframe with either a JavaScript generated table or a server-side include. Either of which should result in a similar appearance on most 4/5 generation and later browsers.
Some webmasters do not appreciate that there are still many users who prefer to use this old browser particularly on old Macs which are too slow for OS X. There are still a lot of these around (including early iMacs) used as second or home Macs. I am not aware of any browser for OS 9 which is free of significant bugs. iCab may be the best but it still makes a mess of displaying some pages. I have not tested Opera for a while but all early versions had a serious bug in the image rendering engine. All Mozilla browsers I have tested have a well documented serious memory leak on non-memory protected (OS 9 and earlier Macs) computers - many casual users will be unaware of this but those who hit several thousand links a day may find they suffer irrecoverable data loss.
Several people reported that this Google bug could stop IE from opening if it normally automatically opened a home page set to google.com. In cases where IE is the default browser clicking on a safe link in an email etc allows it to open so that the home page can be changed. In other cases dropping an html file onto IE's icon should be adequate.
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html - css - 2150 hits since June 2007 - updated 2020-06-07 - webmaster