HTML Page Crashes Windows

Martin Brinkmann
Apr 18, 2006
Updated • Apr 25, 2013
Security
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5

Ok this seems to be serious. If you open a webpage that contains a certain html code your Windows operating system will crash. The HTML is looking like this, its basically just one line of code that displays an image with the width="9999999" and height="9999999". It can contain more code though, but if the specifically prepared image code is on that page, it will crash your PC.

So, only a few lines of code and it crashes your system, the image does not have to be that large by the way as it will automatically be resized. Only working with Microsoft's Internet Explorer it seems,Opera does not have problems with it, some Firefox versions seem to slow down though but these third party browsers won't crash the operating system as a consequence. Thanks to the Groupsrv forum for the information. Another reason for switching to Opera or Firefox if you ask me.

Update: Microsoft has fixed the issue in the meantime, so that the HTML code mentioned in this article is no longer crashing Internet Explorer or the Windows operating system.

It was probably one of those issues that the developers of the web browser did not think about, leading to the browser trying to load the image with exorbitantly high width and height values, which resulted in the crash of the operating system. While it happened to Microsoft's Internet Explorer in this case, it could have as easily happened to other web browsers as well.

It is important to keep your browser up to date to avoid these issues, or at least fix them as soon as a fix is provided by the developer of the browser.  You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer for your operating system from Microsoft's website. Note that versions may differ depending on which system you use.

 

 

 

 

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Comments

  1. Digitarius said on June 14, 2008 at 6:34 am
    Reply

    Apologies if this double-posts.
    Tried this twice now:
    XP SP3 laptop (With only 512 Megs of RAM, I might add)
    Vista Home Premium SP1

    … And it didn’t crash either. I’m sure it’s likely been fixed since 2005. It strikes me as one of those things that people like to bash Windows with, even if it isn’t true (Or, not true any more).

    It’s worth noting that this problem would have applied to Internet Explorer 6. 7 Was released in ’06, after this was posted. So, sure, the moral of the story: Old software and unpatched systems may have exploits or other vulnerabilities.

  2. Digitarius said on June 14, 2008 at 6:27 am
    Reply

    Or… an argument for Vista? I just tried it on my Vista Home Premium SP1 machine. IE7 didn’t BSOD my system.

  3. Jeeth said on April 19, 2006 at 6:43 pm
    Reply

    Tried this one out ().
    On my winxp sp2
    Opera: no problems
    IE6: does not render page
    firefox 1.5.0.2:partially renders, but on refresh crashes windows :(

  4. raky said on April 19, 2006 at 4:34 am
    Reply

    this is a very old one…

  5. mick riley said on April 18, 2006 at 6:06 pm
    Reply

    “Another reason for switching to Opera or Firefox.”
    or LINUX.
    :)

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