
IE 11 Crashes After Clearing 5+ Input Elements - dahjelle
http://jsfiddle.net/dahjelle/zVjfY/
======
be5invis
Well, I tried this in IE11 on Windows 7 x64, all three buttons works. IE11
still works.

screenshot:
[http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/large/798f7769gw1eceuea9cwhj211i0ox10b...](http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/large/798f7769gw1eceuea9cwhj211i0ox10b.jpg)

~~~
dahjelle
The crash would usually happen _after_ the alert box in your code. Typically
after one clicked in one of the input boxes and started putting in more data.

~~~
be5invis
Nope, I tried to modify these fields and clicked the button more than once,
there is still no crush.

BTW, what are the plugins you've installed in IE? What's the OS version?
Performing more information will help everyone to find the bug.

~~~
dahjelle
Windows 7 Home Premium. 64-bit. I have the dynaTrace AJAX tool installed,
though disabled, Java installed but disabled, the Microsoft Messenger
Companion installed but disabled, and the Adobe Reader and Flash plug-ins
installed and _enabled_.

I reset all IE settings to default, as well.

I am running in a VirtualBox virtual machine, though I've reproduced this on
non-virtual machines, as well.

What else is useful?

~~~
be5invis
It's too weird. I'm on Windows 7 Ultimate, 64 bit version, I've tried
everything I could imagine about these textboxes, but still no crush.

Two of my friends tried on Windows 8.1 Pro x64, still no crush.

~~~
dahjelle
Yeah, it's like the crash is depending on something _other_ than Windows
version or IE version, but I don't have any idea what.

One commonality seemed to be Windows 7 Home Premium SP1, but I see someone
else was using Windows 8 and reproduced it. Hmm…

------
judah
I'm running IE 11 here and couldn't get it to crash, despite clearing the
forms, focusing one of the text boxes, and beginning to enter data.

~~~
dahjelle
That's interesting. It crashes regularly for me. What version of IE are you
running? I'm on 11.0.9600.16476 on Windows 7.

~~~
be5invis
No crush, I tried everything I can imagine, including editing these controls,
performing drag-drop but nothing strange happens.

ver 11.0.9600.16476

update 11.0.2

screenshot:
[http://ww3.sinaimg.cn/large/798f7769gw1eceujrxg30j20bf09c0tf...](http://ww3.sinaimg.cn/large/798f7769gw1eceujrxg30j20bf09c0tf.jpg)

~~~
dahjelle
Wow…same version I'm running, and on the same Windows version, but I'm
regularly getting the crash. You don't suppose it has something to do with the
system language or something? What other different factors could there be?

~~~
be5invis
Windows 7 x86 or x64?

What plugins have you installed?

I'm using Simplified Chiense and I cannot reproduce this bug.

~~~
dahjelle
The only plugins I have enabled are Flash and Adobe Reader. All
others—Dynatrace AJAX, Java, Messenger Companion, Windows Live ID, Blog This
in Windows Live Writer—are disabled.

I should mention I'm running in a VirtualBox VM, though I've seen this on a
co-workers box running Windows direct on hardware.

~~~
strmpnk
I've definitely come across VM bugs in the past. Perhaps this could be related
to VirtualBox? IE does use a number of fancy mmu features when JITing JS that
might put pressure on some of the more complex parts of a VM.

~~~
dahjelle
Yes, I thought it might have been that, except co-workers could easily
reproduce it on their machines that aren't VMs. See the DxDiag in a sibling
comment.

~~~
strmpnk
Very interesting. I'll have to try it on one of my home machines I installed
windows on later.

~~~
dahjelle
Let me know what you find. Still haven't been able to figure out the pattern
for why some folks have been able to reproduce this and others can't.

~~~
strmpnk
Following up:

This iMac doesn't reproduce (Windows 8.1 64bit, IE 11.0.2 (11.0.9600.16476),
desktop and metro tested, only add-ons enabled: 1password and fiddler)

~~~
dahjelle
Huh. Interesting. Thank you!

------
swehner
This sounds very much like the bug at
[http://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/808033/ie11...](http://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/808033/ie11-two-
reproducible-crashes-on-assigning-the-value-of-an-input-element-with-
javascript)

The (surprising) solution is to first assign a space character, then the empty
string.

So (I'm guessing), in that
[http://jsfiddle.net/dahjelle/zVjfY/](http://jsfiddle.net/dahjelle/zVjfY/)
code, change

field.value = clearValue;

to

field.value = ' '; field.value = clearValue;

~~~
dahjelle
Fascinating! Yes, indeed, that's a valid workaround!

Not exactly pretty, still, but better that that weird setTimeout mess.

Thanks for the pointer!

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Piskvorrr
Well, shit. And for a few short years, it seemed that IE has outgrown its
monstrous reputation it had rightfully acquired in the 00s; nope, still the
usual "spend enormous time catering to my quirks" IE. This makes me sad.

~~~
belluchan
It hasn't outgrown it's monstrous reputation and it will probably never. IE
has long gaps between updates so it will always quickly fall behind. Software
can still install toolbars and change your default search engine. IE is not
open source. IE 11 does not implement X standards for business reasons, where
X is WebRTC, some missing CSS thing, touch events, etc. You can't test for IE
except on Windows. IE's developer tools are terrible. IE is used by people bad
with computers and corporations with bad IT departments.

For me to care about IE, it would:

have to be available on Mac OS X.

have to have bigger market share in mobile

just have more people using it in general (because frankly it's not used much
by any of the people we care about).

have much, much better development tools

Our development cycle is to develop in Chrome Canary, and proactively test and
fix for Firefox. We don't test in IE but fix IE issues when someone complains
about something not working in IE and if we have the time or think it's
important enough.

~~~
strmpnk
Many of these points are partial truths or at least not as damning as it might
seem.

IE has had long gaps in the past because of IE being tied to larger updates
and many people having invested in old technology depending on them changing
that slowly to allow time to change. The IE team at MicroSoft is clear that
they intend to do more regular releases and push updates out automatically.
While it won't be monthly like other vendors, it's certainly a huge change
from where it was.

Software still installs toolbars on Chrome too. I recently tried Windows again
for the first time in about 13 years and I'll tell you that I was caught off
guard. Toolbars ended up in Chrome AND IE. Not sure if this is a browser
problem as much as a software installation problem. Wish I would have learned
about Chocolately earlier.

Open source isn't something that makes the browser better at being a browser.
It's possibly important in other aspects but you should be complaining about
other browsers then. Many include lots of proprietary code on top of open
engines like WebKit (i.e. Safari is really not all that open source) and then
custom engines like Opera mobile.

WebRTC isn't even half baked yet. Complaining that they don't release it to
millions of devices as a feature is silly. It's great to see browsers
experiment with new APIs that become standards... which leads me to: touch
events.

Touch events were a proprietary outgrowth of the early mobile web. While
they've become defacto for mobiles, it's a limiting API that doesn't really
help unify the way we handle input at all. MSFT released a vendor extension
called pointer events which is a much better API that has now been proposed as
a standard. It handles touch, mouse pointers, pen digitizers, and has space to
interpret more kinds of devices. Much better than where touch events left us.
It's sad that more developers don't demand this unified API either since it
makes it far easier to implement cross-input-device friendly content.

I haven't spent much time with the IE developer tools but it seems that
MicroSoft now provides free VMs that can be installed to run IE for
development ([http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-
tools](http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools)) and their developer
tools seem to have been improved (most people now just complain they want
chrome's developer tools everywhere).

So what is left is that I see people either stuck in the past or thinking that
this whole thing is IE vs everyone else. IE's got the same problems as many
other browsers. We just pick our check list with bias by telling all browser
vendors they should just become Chrome. What's the point in an "open"
ecosystem if people just demand we all do things exactly one way defined
largely by one vendor which happens to develop these "standards" as
proprietary extensions just like IE has for all sorts of things (XHR anyone?).

>_<

~~~
belluchan
strmpnk, what the fuck?

> Software still installs toolbars on Chrome too.

Chrome does not have toolbars. You cannot build a toolbar with Chrome, the
browser has no extensions API to build such a thing. You also cannot
programmatically install extensions. Windows software cannot install
extensions into Chrome, barring some kind of malicious exploit or
vulnerability in Chrome, Chrome will ignore them. They have to be installed by
the user from the Google Web Store or via the developer tools, which has to be
done manually.

I'd like to hear if anything I've said in the previous paragraph is wrong, I
have never seen a toolbar in Chrome ever. You can't even build it into the
website with scripts because of how those APIs work and anyway websites could
detect that and I've never seen it.

> WebRTC isn't even half baked yet. Complaining that they don't release it to
> millions of devices as a feature is silly. It's great to see browsers
> experiment with new APIs that become standards... which leads me to: touch
> events.

This is bullshit, as we've built WebRTC into our application and it works
perfectly in Chrome and Firefox. In addition there are entire businesses based
around WebRTC availability so, you are mistaken here.

> Open source isn't something that makes the browser better at being a
> browser.

It matters to developers who build websites. I can debug my application all
the way into the Chrome source, and have had to when JIT ruined my JavaScript.

Even 6 month updates are way too long, and I doubt that we'll see updates in
that time frame anyway. The IE VM tools are slow and horrible, it's not
usable, I've tried it. It's no replacement for native development and we're
not going to support it. Maybe some draconian soulless corporation has made
browser vm's an option to their poor mac engineers, but fuck if I'm going to
do that. Your entire apologist response is factually incorrect or misleading.
It's very misinformed and one-sided (although I also come across one-sided).
Weird post anyway.

~~~
strmpnk
belluchan, slow down a little before you assume I'm just making shit up.

Toolbars as in default search and browser plugins which do layer on buttons on
the UI. I'd count that as a toolbar. Happened to me just last week when I
installed software on Windows 8.1. Chrome definitely is just as prone to
infected additions. Count me as surprised.

Re: WebRTC, how long has that actually worked? WebRTC is still under
development. It if worked in the last few months chances are it didn't work
the same way before. Chances are it won't keep working that way later. It's
exciting tech, I love WebRTC but calling it a missing feature before it's
landed for a few months is kind of asking for a bit much, even for Firefox and
Chrome (audio APIs, MathML, JavaScript language features, &c). The fact these
two browsers interoperate at all is because of a ton of hard work they put
into collaborating to make things work. Of course, "work" being defined by
what is easiest for their current implementations to change. Still, you
probably assumed I was trying to bash WebRTC, I'm not but it's very new tech
in terms of the current interoperable feature set. Give it six months and then
come back to complain.

I'm glad you solved your Chrome issues with tracing C++ code. Sucks when that
happens.

I don't see how this makes supporting IE entirely impossible and super
painful. You have so many fewer variables in play with the IE release cycle
that it's hard to complain. I've had Chrome bugs that triggered on only
certain builds on certain operating systems that took me a ton of work to
reproduce. Looks like the problem reported here is not hitting everyone either
but it's already narrowed down to only a few possible versions and operating
systems.

To make things worse, Chrome didn't have much help on debugging on mobile
devices for a long time. It was quite hard to get an accurate rendering and
runtimes with complete debugging.

The IE VM isn't slow here. I just downloaded and tried it to write this
comment. I get WebGL and all running in my VM. Not sure what you're talking
about. Felt fast to me.

Anyway... I'm not an apologist. I build software and honestly most of these
rants I see are complete FUD. They show either ignorance about what options
are available or the bias of choosing one flavor of proprietary over another.
I don't care if you use or support IE or not (I don't use IE nor do I run
Windows on anything but one machine to play some old games I like).

------
nticompass
Tried this and it crashed for me on IE 11.0.9600.16476 (Update Versions:
11.0.2) on Windows 7.

Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/oSi1rlL.png](http://i.imgur.com/oSi1rlL.png)

Steps:

\- Filled in all fields

\- Clicked 1st clear button

\- Clicked in 1st field

\- Tried to type something

~~~
be5invis
x86 or x64?

\-- update --

I tried the identical reproduction process and IE11 still working.

~~~
nticompass
Windows 7 x64 (Home Premium SP1)

~~~
be5invis
On a real machine OR inside a VM?

~~~
nticompass
This is on my actual machine, not a VM.

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dahjelle
We ran into this in out application the other day, and it's a surprisingly
"normal" thing to do to result in a hard crash of a browser.

I'm especially curious if anyone knows:

1\. Is there any hope of this being fixed in the near-term? The MS bug report
didn't have much information. I'd sure like to avoid implementing the somewhat
crazy workaround if I can help it.

2\. It seems like this ought to be a pretty widespread problem. Are others
seeing it? Are there other workarounds that aren't so ugly?

------
izietto
It doesn't work here :-( Win 8.1, IE 11.0.9431.228

~~~
dahjelle
Reports of no crash are actually more interesting to me than the crash at the
moment…maybe I can protect our customers. Are you running Windows 7 or 8? Any
add-ons?

~~~
c0n5pir4cy
I'm running on Windows 7 (x86_64) with IE 11.0.9431.0, No addons at all and
there are no crashes.

DxDiag: [http://pastebin.com/M0msHVh3](http://pastebin.com/M0msHVh3)

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dahjelle
I was also able to reproduce this on all of the IE 11 instances on
[http://browserstack.com](http://browserstack.com): Windows 8.1 desktop and
metro and Windows 7.

I did notice that the crash very occasionally _didn 't_ happen the first time,
but did, perhaps, the second.

------
ignu
personally, i think it's adorable that microsoft keeps trying to make a web
browser.

~~~
at-fates-hands
It's also frustrating as hell that they finally improved the dev tools and
then removed all the browser and document modes. Pretty typical though for
them. One step forward, three steps back.

~~~
nticompass
Noting will ever pull me away from Chrome's DevTools! Not IE, not even
Firebug.

------
nticompass
In case anyone is wondering, it doesn't crash in IE 8! :-D

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adrianlmm
It didn't crash for me.

