[thelist] Strange IE behavior

Juha Suni juha.suni at ilmiantajat.fi
Thu Nov 3 09:15:40 CST 2005


> Roger - thanks for looking at it for me. We just tested it on a
> machine here at work and, even though the Acrobat program had been
> updated, the EULA hadn't been accepted by the admin. IE crashed. We
> went in as Admin and accepted the EULA - IE stopped crashing. What
> gets me is that there is nothing on that page that should call the
> Acrobat program. No PDFs or anything that Acrobat should be
> reading...

Since your site crashing seems to have something to do with Acrobat reader I 
decided to dig a bit into it, and I think I've found the cause.

Your site uses some nasty javascript tracker script to track users and their 
system specs and installed software that is run at least on the front page 
(script located at http://www.mrrl.org/includes/awstats_misc_tracker.js and 
takes url parameters of the form "?SCREEN=1280x1024&CDI=32&JAVA=true..." and 
so on). The script is included right at the bottom of the page, before the 
closing </body>, as you can see from the source.

Taking a peek at this javascript tracker, it seems that the script prints 
out some suspicious ActiveX / VBScript stuff that detects if certain plugins 
are installed on the client machine. The testing seems to be done by rather 
brutally by inserting dummy objects into the page and seeing how the browser 
reacts to them. These detected plugins include, for example, Java, 
Macromedia Director, Shockwave, Realplayer, Quicktime, Mediaplayer, and, as 
you guessed, Acrobat PDF plugin.

Im not even going to start with how evil and inappropriate it is for your 
site to track these things so aggressively in the first place. And yes, the 
problem occurs with IE only since it swallows the VBscript as well as it can 
(unlike mozilla, for example).

I am quite sure the dummy-pdf-object created by the trackerscript is what 
makes certain configurations crash violently.

HTH

-- 
Suni 




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