IE 6,7,8 crashed? Possible problems and workarounds (discussion thread)

It could be a JS error, if you have a test site please test with the latest development version of Adaptivetheme - 7.x-2.c-dev, because this version changes how respond.js is loaded, which is known to crash certain versions of IE8, but I have never heard of it crashing IE6/7.

Why do you think is this the theme? You have slideshow and some noIE thing installed as well, could be a number of things, and I have never experienced this theme crashing IE6/7 on default install.

I just installed a new site and have the same problem. Subscribing to see notifications.

I need more than "my site crashed" because I cannot reproduce.

In my case I would say that Internet Explorer crashed. IE9 on my Windows 7 machine works OK. But on IE8 on Windows XP the browser crashes. It goes into a sort of recovery loop and says the site is broken, it offers a retry link, which works, but then it crashes again.

I shall have to reset my site theme and do another test on my XP machine. Back shortly.

It may be that my remarks are misplaced. I have been checking on this IE8 machine and the AT themes as loaded are all OK. It is when I use the Pixture Reloaded sub-theme I get the problem. (As you own both, does it need raising there?).

When I set that as the theme then IE crashes and recovers, just like the symptoms reported by OP. It restarts itself at a page saying:

We were unable to return you to southamonline.org.uk.

Internet Explorer has stopped trying to restore this website. It appears that the website continues to have a problem.
What you can do:
Go to your home page

Try to return to southamonline.org.uk

IE8 crash is already documented and fixes have been committed to head for Pixture Reloaded - please see this: #1323608: Background image on body causes respond.js to crash IE8

Any testing needs to be done with DEV versions, that includes Adaptivetheme core and any subtheme - fixes have been committed for some of these things, and the OP's original report is against IE Tester and Netrenderer, no one is reporting this crashing on stable versions of IE 6/7 on XP.

The only way to actually verify this is to run XP in a virtual machine, or better still run an XP machine with IE6 installed properly. I have both VM Ware and Win7 Ultimate which can run in XP mode and run IE6/7 natively. I can't reproduce crashes in either of those browsers.

OK, I will follow up that lead - CSS compression is a factor. Awesome, thanks very much.

Where are the Dev versions shown. On projects they are normally listed, but I don't see them on the themes (AT, Pixture Reloaded).

I'll enable them so they show for download, sorry, you can always check them out using GIT.

Thanks for making them directly available. I loaded them and it seems to have stopped the crash. Just checking, but IE8 does not seem to show images. OK on other browsers.

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I have checked the source on IE8 and the image references are being included. However there just seems to be a grey frame where the image should be.

 <figure class="field-item" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="http://www.southamonline.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/Cardall.jpg">
        <img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.southamonline.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/Cardall.jpg" width="100" height="69" alt="Mayor and Mayoress of Southam, Mike Gaffney  and Gwenda meet Bernard Cadogan" title="Mayor and Mayoress of Southam, Mike Gaffney  and Gwenda meet Bernard Cadogan" />                             
                                    </figure>

If IE is set to 'no style' then the picture shows.

@ magpie5212:

Not sure what you mean by "If IE is set to 'no style' then the picture shows."?

Do you have a link, I certainly cannot reproduce this problem.

By 'no style' I mean a setting on IE. View> Style> No Style. This just turns off style interpretation for IE. They also show, but in the wrong position, if you set Compatibility View under the Tools menu.

Take a look at the front page of southamonline.org.uk for some examples. On my XP machine with IE I see small gray rectangles where I expect the pictures to be.

OK, well I wonder if someone else can confirm this and propose a solution, I can't replicate it in IE8 on Win7. I only have one Win7 machine and even though it runs Ultimate the XP Mode is not working, I will ring MS support (again) and see if they can provide a fix so I can run IE8 in XP Mode.

I can confirm that this is crashing on IE8 running on Windows XP. The site renders when in compatibility mode, but crashes otherwise. My site is using AdaptiveThemes 7.x-2.1, Pixture Reloaded 7.x-2.2, and a custom subtheme.

rositis - yeah we pretty much know this for sure, do you have the time to test with DEV versions of both themes? That, as indicated by other users, should fix the issue - mainly because it removes the background image from the body element and places respond.js in the footer.

Running the latest DEV version on http://southamonline.org.uk. Not getting any crashes, but still have the invisible pictures on articles (#13 above, IE8 on XP).

I had the same crash with IE8 under WinXP, but only when setting a background image for "body" tag in CSS (https://github.com/scottjehl/Respond/issues/83).
I am using an AT 7x-2.1 subtheme, and wouldn´t like to remove the background pattern for IE8.

Will it be automatically removed when updating AT to 2.2?

I temporarily moved the background-image selector from "body" to "html" tag in CSS, and IE8 works fine now. Don´t know if it is a good solution, but it did the trick.

It won't removed when updating - if you have used the HTML instead of BODY then thats fine. What the DEV and all future versions of Adaptivtheme do is place the respond.js file in the footer as this has also been reported as a viable fix, although I think to play it safe keep using the HTML element for background images.

Marking this as fixed again, update title.

I am having an issue with IE as well it tries to load the page then fails. Anyway to get this to work with CSS compression on?

xbrianx - we need more information, such as what theme are you using and what version.

Was using Adaptive Theme version 7.x -2.1 but updated to the Dev version just now to see if that would help matters. The site crashes in IE 8 when css compression is on. I turned it off and it does load. I would prefer to have compression on to help save space however.

xbrianx - doubt very much this has anything to do with the theme.

See the attached screenshot - this is IE8 running with CSS aggregation on - no issues, I can surf around the site without any issues.

Maybe if you can show me your site we might be able to figure out what is going on - it could be a module you have installed etc.

Ok, i'll send you the site info

Thanks Jeff Burnz for your help on this. I just "discovered" this issue today, that IE8 on Windows XP has some issues. I have an older laptop so I'm able to run Windows XP on one and Windows 7 on the other.

So far, the fixes for me have been:

1) move background image from Body to HTML (that solved the browser crash in Windows XP)
2) Disable CSS compression (if I leave this on, my images on Windows XP/IE8 start to overlap the text, as though they had no width)
3)Disable Cufon (leaving this on, my text in Windows XP/IE8 is doubled all over the place)

I am now running the latest DEV version of Adaptive Theme 2. None of these issues are for Windows 7. My guess is it has something to do with the responsive design?

The site in question for me is QBS.com. I just switched over from Cufon to Typekit, FYI.

Hi! I have a Windows XP / IE 8 crash on my development platform @ stezun.kiev.ua using Pixture Reloaded sub-theme with Adaptivetheme 7-2.2 and Pixture Reloaded 7-2.2. Should i try a dev version?

lessless - yes, DEV version of PR

but it's older than stable
Pixture Reloaded dev 7.x-1.2 2011-Jul-30
Pixture Reloaded stable 7.x-2.2 2011-Oct-04

just do it anyway?

lessless, no its not, look again, 7.x-2.x-dev was update Feb 18th, 3 days ago.

heh, where was my eyes - thank you so much.
Although, error persist, ie still crash with Pixture Reloaded 7.x-2.2+6-dev.

seems for some people its fixed, for some it crashes, who can know with this ancient piece of junk browser. I mean really, its your choice to use it, not mine, can't win em all eh?

my choice? i just get in drupal and looked for html5 three columns theme which one i can use further.

Sure, who is forcing you to use it? Are you being black-mailed by anyone? You got another thing coming if you think you are going to pressure me to fix some weird bug because some people CHOOSE to use an ancient operating system and an ancient browser, which occasionally crashes because... ??? who knows?

Why on earth should I jump through hoops to make things backward compatible with yesterdays technology? Time to move on, and none to soon, the web is rapidly evolving and if you want to keep driving a 1950's banger, that's up to you.

Learn this lessless, this is free open source software, if you can't live with that, then you are in the wrong place.

Sorry, that is not what i mean :) I mean that i am using Ubuntu and Firefox and even didn't know about some issues with ie, until have been told. So what is the dust about? I like this work but it lacks an old browser support.
If i knewed this i wouldn't waste my time, so wouldn't it be good to make a notice on the project page that it do not support ie8 and lower?

No need to get emotional, some are not so fortunate to choose which browser to develop for :(

I had the same problem with IE8 on a WinXP virtual machine (IE8 verson is 8.0.6001.18702). The crash is caused by respond.js, it must be added as the very last item in the body, which you know and trying to do. Unfortunately in my case the colorbox module squeezed itself between the respond.js script tag and the closing body tag. Manually adding respond.js in the html.tpl.php template right before the closing body tag fixes the crash.

Unfortunately I have to withdraw my comment and my patch, because my patch had actually removed respond.js, which also fixes the crash, but is not the point of the patch. I keep researching...

It seems the crash has been fixed by the respond.js author:
https://github.com/scottjehl/Respond/issues/106

With the newest version of respond.js my site does not crash IE8 anymore.

Good stuff, I will update, this has been an ongoing issue with respond.js, the same or similar issues have been opened and fixed a couple of times, this is a new fix that hopefully fixes this once and for all!

I have pushed the updated respond.js to 7.x-2.x-dev and 7.x-3.x-dev

Assuming issues are resolved, no updates for several months now.

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