Thanks to Kelly Yancey, who found a Japanese Blog that discussed an interesting bit of HTML, it reminds me of the Doctor Who special called 'The Christmas Invasion', where the Prime Minister destroys the retreating Sycorax spaceship, much to the Doctor's annoyance.
The Doctor: Don't challenge me, Harriet Jones. 'Cause I'm a completely new man. I could bring down your Government with a single word.
Harriet Jones: You're the most remarkable man I've ever met. But I don't think you're quite capable of that.
The Doctor: No, you're right. Not a single word.
[pause]
The Doctor: Just six.
Harriet Jones: I don't think so.
The Doctor: Six words.
Harriet Jones: Stop it!
The Doctor: Six.
[approaches Alex, whispering in his ear]
The Doctor: Don't you think she looks tired?
How to bring down IE with six words...
... or more specifically five HTML tags and a CSS declaration:
<styl>*{position:relative}</style><table><input /></table>
In short, it sends Internet Explorer down in flames. IE is not known for great CSS support at the best of times, I suppose here that some piece of badly written code within IE did not expect the wildcard and so IE is going round in an infinite loop, causing a memory error or buffer overrun or one of these other horrible things that languages without inbuilt memory management are susceptible to.
Kelly reported that it was only IE6, however, I tested in IE7 and had a similar effect.
Start by opening this link. You get a webpage like this:
Perhaps we are not worried yet, so far so good. However, now try to go somewhere else, say in a new tab:
Houston we have a problem.
<p>ie does not crash with that link at all on vista but crashes on xp</p>
<p>Thanks for that gabe. That is an interesting distinction. Are you opening the
new tab? I wonder how Windows 2000 and 98 react. There are a lot of users
still using those operating systems that do not get much in the way of
updates.</p>
<p>I personally do not use Windows at all personally, besides testing websites
when I use XP. I am currently avoiding Vista at the moment, although I'm sure
I will need to have a test virtual machine one day (I make websites in my day
job).</p>
<p>Oh, Internet Explorer is a joke. I found out the other day at work another
little problem... a piece of JavaScript worked perfectly in Firefox, but not
in IE. It turns out that IE has problems with <a class="reference external" href="http://freepressblog.org/blog/2007/07/30/dynamic-radio-buttons-in-ie/">dynamic radio buttons</a>. Utter
crap, for the most-used browser in the world. What annoys me is that these
bugs are in IE7, not IE6. And, as far as I know, there is no website where
bugs can be sent through. Bloody Microsoft, eh?</p>
<p>Note: What I meant by "in IE7, not IE6" above was not that the bugs weren't
in IE6 at all (I don't know, they might have been), but just that they're in
the latest version of the browser, one which is supposed to be standards
compliant etc...</p>
<p>working web developer i have come to truly despise IE sometimes. I never had
to much of a problem with it until i started working on sites that need to
support down to IE5!!!</p>
<p>I've come across some really annoying IE bugs but luckily i spend 90% of my
time working on the back-end (python FTW!) but that 10% i have to deal with
the front end i hate because of IE.</p>
<p>Sorry for the little rant there. Anyway i don't hate IE completely just
annoys me a lot.</p>
<p>When i read this earlier it just made me laugh and remember a bug i came
across not to long ago. IE6 crashing when "window.onresize" is set and
something is moved or resized using Javascript??!! that had me confused for a
while</p>
<p>Doesn't crash on XP x64</p>
<p>How to bring down a server in six words?</p>
<p>Make it onto Slashdot!</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/08/0212223">http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/08/0212223</a></p>
<p>Funnily enough the server is still responsive in other ways, so the problem
is with how Apache is configured. Or maybe having 3000 users within the first
10 minutes is always just a bit tough.</p>
<p>does not crash on last xp 15 (XP pro processor IE 7) 32bit celeron mobile</p>
<p>It blows a freshly-installed IE6 out of X the moment it loads the page, using Crossover Wine under Ubuntu Edgy.</p>
<p>BTW your actual file differs from the one you quote. It actually reads:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span class="o">*</span><span class="p">{</span><span class="k">position</span><span class="o">:</span><span class="k">relative</span><span class="p">}</span>
<span class="o">(</span><span class="nt">omitting</span> <span class="nt">the</span> <span class="nt">comment</span><span class="o">).</span>
</pre></div>
<p>IE 7 crashes on Win XP 64bit!</p>
<p>wowzerz! IE disappeared on XP SP2 x86 w/IE6. No crash message.</p>
<p>What would happen if this were embedded in a page with other harmless
content?</p>
<p>Wow, nice way to punish ie users, hehehee.</p>
<p>Adam C writes:
> What would happen if this were embedded
> in a page with other harmless content?</p>
<p>Why, then your page would be invalid HTML,
and you wouldn't want that, would you? :-)</p>
<p>It kills IE 5.0 on a fresh Win98 installation.</p>
<p>Crashes IE 5.0 on Windows 2000 SP2... Go to the page, and straight away it
crashes - no need to navigate to another page.</p>
<p>IE7 (7.0.6000.16473) in Vista Business (Intel Core2) crashes with the crash
page open, when you open a new tab.</p>
<p>Not immediately, it takes a few seconds.
Interesting find... <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/smile.png"></p>
<p>I put this on my myspace, because I hate it. It works crashing IE on my XP
SP2 32-bit.</p>
<p>I opened the page in windows explorer - because silly microsoft allows that,
and it crashed the desktop! woot!! i am loving this!</p>
<p>Crashes IE 6.0 on WIN 2000 on page load - no need to navigate to another
page!</p>
<p>Very nice. I'll have to put this with the IE-detecting conditional comments
and other bug-inducing code on my proof-of-concept website.</p>
<p>No crash on IE 7 (7.0.5730.11) on Windows XP Version 2002 SP 2.</p>
<p>If you have it stored on a XP machine, it will crash Windows explorer when
you <em>select</em> it. No need to even open Internet Explorer!</p>
<p>Crashes IE7 on my windows XP laptop. Not right away, but after a few secs</p>
<p>On my locked down work machine with XP and IE6, it just simply blows up when
it tries to load that page. Doesn't even give me the "An error occured", or
even loads up the page. It simply dies without saying a word.</p>
<p>On ubuntu, under wine (with ies4linux), it crashes ie6 but not ie7.</p>
<p>Firefox 3 will freeze from an object element with a present but empty data
attribute.</p>
<p>[object data=""]
or even just
[object data</p>
<p>Where [] are angle brackets.</p>
<p>My IE crashes when attempting to play Windows Media Player streams. Grow the
fcuk up. Do something important with your time. This is ridiculous</p>
<p>No problems for me.</p>
<p>Page loads, other pages load, life continues with no problems at all for my
MSIE 7.</p>
<p>7.0.5730.11 on XP Pro SP2, fully patched.</p>
<p>Hey I showed this to my friends and they said this is not a trick IE does
this all the time :-)</p>
<p>Strike that comment!</p>
<p>Didn't realize it took 2-3 minutes to crash. Yet another reason to stick to
Firefox....</p>
<p>Since no one else thought of it yet, IETab in Firefox will crash on that
page, no need to navigate elsewhere.</p>
<p>This is on XP Pro SP2, Firefox 2.0.0.6(I think).</p>
<p>At first, I though it would not crash, but I had not read the entire article:
To see the crash <strong>you must open a new tab</strong>. I suspect most of the people
who claim that IE 7 does not crash are not navigating anywhere.</p>
<p>crashes rather nicely on my IE7 using Vista Home Premium (32bit)</p>
<p>all we need now is a viscious script to make that page the startup page in
IE...</p>
<p>finally the internet will be free!!</p>
<p>This is great. I've put this on my myspace page. Nobody with IE gets to see
me now!</p>
<p>To keep IE users from viewing your page, all you need is an empty title tag.
You can fill it in with script if you want a title.
your content here</p>
<p>My Windows explorer crashes too!!
I created test.html file with those nasty 5 tags! when I click ( NOT double
click) on the file, my Windows explorer crashed. So I was unable to open that
file using IE.</p>
<p>Then I opened IE 6 and used File->Open->Browse to this test.html and You know
what would have happened!</p>
<p>I was unable to delete that file, just by selecting and delete!!</p>
<p>Crashes IE7+ on Windows Vista Ultimate Edition a few seconds after opening a
new tab. I get the "Internet Explorer has stopped working" dialog box.</p>
<p>You are my hero. Destroying IE, whilst quoting Dr. Who? Awesomeness on a
stick.</p>
<p>So an asterisk causes it to crash? Maybe this should be called the "Barry
Bonds Bug".</p>
<p>I have no problems at all, my browser has no trouble rendering the page, even
after a while.</p>
<p>Guess my Mac is defective.... :-)</p>
<p>I got my 6.0 on XP SP2 to crash direcly on load. I couldn't even see the
input border. Crash, crash, crash <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/smile.png"></p>
<p>crashed on load on my computer.
ie v6 and windows media center</p>
<p>What amuses me are all the techies who go from bitching about old IE to
talking about how they have to support it in their websites all in one
breath... grow spines, or at least balls. If shitty websites stopped working
in IE 5, people would have to upgrade. It's your own damn faults people still
use it. Cliched though this may be, you're just like all those German
citizens who became Nazis, because they lacked the self-confidence to say
"no".</p>
<p>Crashes my IE 7 on XP sp2 fully patched. Only when opening a new tab though</p>
<p>alert('uh oh')test</p>
<p>IE sux. FF pwnz</p>
<p>Hamachiya discovered this a few days ago, and it's repeated here.</p>
<p>Extremely cool bug. Tested it on my Windows system:</p>
<ol class="arabic simple">
<li>Copy-n-paste url into the IE address field to load, will crash IE on load.</li>
<li>Emailing the HTML file/document to myself via Outlook did not crash outlook. guess it's not using IE for the rendering?</li>
<li>Saving the code to an html file will result in a IE/iexplorer crash, upon opening the file via double-click. Select, then right click to delete did not cause a crash. Perhaps because I don't have previewing/etc stuff turned on.</li>
<li>would be interesting to see how this behaves if your activex desktop is setup to load this as one of the html/doc files to show on the desktop?</li>
</ol>
<p>Screencap:</p>
<blockquote>
<img alt="http://commandline.org.uk/images/posts/windows/hamachiya_ie_nocrash_ie7.gif" src="http://commandline.org.uk/images/posts/windows/hamachiya_ie_nocrash_ie7.gif"/>
</blockquote>
<p>XP Pro (5.1.2600) x86 32bit IE7.0.5730.11 Update versions:0 - Doesn't crash, but will not re-render the tab. Mem usage stays within acceptable range: 21Mb - 32Mb.</p>
<p>XP x86 causes Internet Exploder to crash and burn.
No effect on IE7.
W2K SP4 and IE 5.01.. no messages in fact it takes out Windows Explorer too.</p>
<p>Um... how does one find this out? There is no reason you would ever write
that...</p>
<p>It crashes on Vista x64, both IE7 x86 and IE7 x64. For those of you who say
it doesn't crash: try opening a new tab by clicking the 'new tab' minitab. It
crashes nicely.</p>
<p>Ubuntu 7.04 with wine and IE6</p>
<p>IE6 crashes</p>
<p>Here I collected all 7 still working ways of crashing IE, at least in version
6:
<a class="reference external" href="http://seo2.0.onreact.com/top-7-ways-to-crash-internet-explorer">http://seo2.0.onreact.com/top-7-ways-to-crash-internet-explorer</a></p>
<p>The problem is with the malformed tag and it's been around for quite a while</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/319360/2003-04-20/2003-04-26/0">http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/319360/2003-04-20/2003-04-26/0</a></p>
<p>more nothing less. Is this all it takes to kill IE7? Well yes, just follow
this link, courtesy of Commandline, and if the browser doesn’t crash
immediately try opening a new</p>
<p>Neat little exploit, but what would the html be to hide the box that results
from it? Wouldn't do for non IE viewers to see a random input table...</p>
<p>I tried this on IE7 on Vista, when I opened a new tab and started typing a
url it crashed. I don't know why it didn't work for Gabe but it certainly
worked for me.</p>
<p>well, let's combine that with the Win98 + IE 4/5 bug that crashes the machine.</p>
<p>Crashes IE6 running on WINE in Ubuntu Linux.</p>
<p>CRASH AND BURN INTERNET EXPLORER!</p>
<p>it doesnt crash ietab for firefox, HUZZAh</p>
<p>Opera handels it fine, of course.
Seeing as they got important people that invented CSS on their team, its
hardly supprising.</p>
<p>It didn't crash internet explorer, but my Avast anti-virus detected it as a
VBS virus. So it never had a chance to crash. Weird.</p>
<p>Tried to load in IE7 and Firefox on Vista<img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/sad.png"> with Avast! virus protection. It catches it as a VBS:Malware with the message:</p>
<p><tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">VBS:Malware</span> <span class="pre">[Gen]"</span> <span class="pre">has</span> <span class="pre">been</span> <span class="pre">found</span> <span class="pre">in</span> <span class="pre">"<a href="http://hamachiya.com/junk/ie_crash.html" rel="nofollow">http://hamachiya.com/junk/ie_crash.html</a></span></tt></p>
<p>Maxthon 1.5.9 crash too!!! <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/big_smile.png"></p>
<p>it also crashes microsoft visual studio (2003) <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/tongue.png"></p>
<p>Well, it kills 7.0.5730.11 right away... on Win2k3 Server WTS.</p>
<p>Urgh!</p>
<p>Didn't do anything in IE7 XP edition.</p>
<p>Fun stuff, kills IE6 in XP (at work) and IETab within Firefox! Plus, I think
I found a new link for my sig files:</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://commandline.org.uk/more/microsoft/how-to-bring-down-internet-explorer-with-six-words-2007-08-07-19-18.html">http://commandline.org.uk/more/microsoft/how-to-bring-down-internet-explorer-with-six-words-2007-08-07-19-18.html</a>?showcomments=yes%3Cstyle%3E*{position:relative}%3C/style%3E%3Ctable%3E%3Cinput%20/%3E%3C/table%3E</p>
<p>Click on that link in IE, crash! Yea!</p>
<p>I tested the code in Windows XP Pro SP2 under VMware. FireFox opened it
fine, IE 6 crashes as expected. The surprising thing is IE 5.2 for Mac. Which
was discontinued years back, opened the file fine just like FF.</p>
<p>Im having problems with a brand spanking new instalation of xp 64 , any
program i open crashes as soon as i start typing , if i write what i want in
notepad and copy it in it works , Im currently typing this on my MBP and i
wish i had spent my cold hard cash on a mac pro now instead of a pc but does
anyone have any idea what this could be , no viruses on my computer or any
adware spyware etc etc .. im clean but the darn thing still keeps crashing
..thanks Bill.. Keep it up Mr. Jobs .</p>
<p>I didn't know that anyone with enough savvy to do this was still using IE. Almost everyone I know here in Brazil is using something different and even most of my friends in the USA are using Firefox, Safari, or Opera. Naturally, they will always be those so ignorant and helpless that they will accept any piece of garbage Micro$oft hands out. But I am surprised readers here would do it.</p>
<p>dude, my anti-virus picks the website as a malware carrier LOL</p>
<p>my antivirus (Avast) blocks it as malware XD</p>
<p>Symantec picked it up too.</p>
<p>My antivirus do the same ! An alert "Malware"</p>
<p>it also crashes microsoft visual studio (2004) <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/tongue.png"></p>