Prototype and TEXTware QUICKfind vs Internet Explorer

You know we’re sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?

After launching the rewritten and redesigned BiQ I got word of seemingly random IE installations crashing within seconds of opening BiQ. I could not find a way to reproduce this and it only occured on a tiny minority of client installations, so I shrugged it off as yet another reason to upgrade to Firefox.

However, this weekend I talked to a friend of mine who told me that he had experienced this IE crash himself and that the IT guys at his office knew what was causing the problem.

It turns out that the combination of Prototype and certain Internet Explorer add-ons (in particular one called QUICKfind BHO) is lethal and causes Internet Explorer to raise a Kernel error and crash when the mouse is moved.

This crash occurs in a fully patched IE6 on Windows XP SP2, I have not verified Internet Explorer 7 or other versions of IE.

Fixing it

The patching way

Changing the Event references in Prototype presumable fixes this. I haven’t really dug into Prototype to know how much work is involved in this but a quick count reveals 14 occurrences of Event in prototype.js. A quick replacing all of those with PrototypeEvent made biq.dk load with no errors and no crashes. That said, it probably breaks everything everywhere else, I didn’t check.

I wouldn’t count on getting a patch like this committed to Prototype, though. It would probably break a ton of code already in the wild, and the Prototype folks can easily (and rightfully) claim that the bug should be fixed in QUICKfind (and it has been)

Keeping your local version of Prototype patched with these changes and up to date with new releases might be a bit cumbersome as well.

The disabling way

Have people simply disable the malfunctioning add-on. It’s a simple matter of going into Tools > Manage Add-ons, selecting the QUICKfind BHO Object and clicking “Disable”. That’s how Audi.dk deals with it.

The upgrading way

If your users actually use the features of the add-on (I am not quite sure exactly what it does - as far as I can tell the only feature it adds to my IE is the crash), you should have people update their QUICKfind add-on.

An updated version of the add-on can be downloaded and installed from Gyldendal, a danish provider of dictionaries and one of the distributors of the faulty add-on.

In conclusion

Once in a while being a web developer is just tons of fun, huh? With a myriad of independent pieces of software between you and your customer there are so many things that can break in unpredictable ways it’s impossible to prevent or even detect all of it.

I initially had a section of this blog entry titled “The blame game” where I attempted to figure out who to blame for this. While fingers can be pointed at Prototype, QUICKfind, and Internet Explorer I scrapped the section since it didn’t provide anything useful. I do want to keep the following paragraph, though:

While the crash in this case is caused by a combination of two third-party pieces of software, Internet Explorer holds a large part of the blame. A website should never ever be able to crash the user agent - ever. An add-on should never be able to crash the host environment (but I realize that’s mainly an idealistic and unrealistic idea on my behalf).

But enough of that. The crash has been fixed by (at least) one of the responsible parties and I am content with that.

Comments and Trackbacks

thank you! That blog post saved my day. I already spammed prototype-core on this. I am now recycling the audi.dk code to add this to our framework.

Had that exact same problem earlier this year. Made a post about it as well, your description is better however so I think I am gonna make a link here :o)

http://www.whatastruggle.com/2007/02/23/prototype-scriptaculous-crashes-ie6/

I can confirm this problem in fully patched IE7 as well. However, it seems like the Gyldendal patch does not work every time. Disabling does.

I am curious to what this BHO really does and who provides it. The Common denominator so far seems to be use of a dictionary, and some application called Textware installed.

Correction; the patch has worked every time. However, one user reported having to restart the machine for the patch to work.

Thanks for your e-mail jakob :)

Thanks for sharing this. We had a storm of complains from users on ekstrabladet.dk after starting to use prototype. Now I just have to figure out how to sort it out (can't really ask users to upgrade, etc.).