Google bug

The purpose of this page is to document what I have discovered about the 'bug' responsible for the Internet Explorer (IE) crashes caused by Google and previously described on http://links.zero.eu.org/google/.

I have reduced the code required to cause the crashes to:

<html>
<head>
<title>Google bug</title>
<style type="text/css">
#gbi { position: absolute; display: none }
#gbh { position: absolute; width: 200% }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<iframe id=gbi></iframe><div id=gbh></div>
</body>
</html>

Google's original code did not include: type="text/css" but I have added this to make it valid HTML 4.

Almost any alteration to the above code (except changing div to p) stops the crashes especially:

  1. Adding any doctype declaration - necessary for valid HTML

  2. Adding any content (including white space):

    1. between the </iframe> and <div id=gbh> tags - optional but conventional layout might have a line feed here

    2. between the <div id=gbh> and </div> tags - these tags are redundant unless they are placeholders for content to be added by script.

Those who wish to try the above code can hit the following links (both pages lack any content):

With a doctype declaration - http://links.zero.eu.org/google/with-dt.html - does not crash Mac IE

Without a doctype declaration - http://links.zero.eu.org/google/without-dt.html - danger - this will crash Mac IE - may cause serious data loss.

My conclusion is that the primary fault is Google's for not using valid code with a doctype declaration but the browsers should never have been released with such a serious vulnerability. Since the browsers are no longer being maintained and IE 5.1.7 is only one of two reasonable browsers for pre OS X Macs (see http://links.zero.eu.org/google/) web designers should take care not to reproduce Google's unfortunate code.

This is an Informatics page.

html - css - 2005 hits since June 2007 - updated 2020-06-07 - webmaster