prototype.js and Textware QuickFIND BHO crashes IE
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007You do hate when you get very obscure error reports from your clients? Atleast I do. Especially those screenshots of the very descriptive Microsoft “This program has encountered error and needs to be closed.”. Why the default crash dialog needs to be so general and all the interesting bits are hidden behind some “click here” link? Normal users usually just take screenshots of the first error dialog they see and assume we would know from that what’s wrong.
This time the problem was that IE was crashing instantly when visiting our web application’s first page. I asked our client to send some screenshots of his IE settings and I google around a bit. I instructed him to disable 3rd party extensions which did solve the problem. Further investigation revealed that the problem was Textware’s QuickFIND BHO which he no doubt gotten from Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary. I could find only one screenshot of this program in action. Looks quite useful application, but definetely very buggy. Unfortunately the Textware company is long gone as well. Their website just points to some very generic site. I doubt we will be getting any updates to QuickFIND.
The problem is the way this IE add-on works. It monitors your mouse movements in IE and displays info about the text your mouse is hovering. For some reason prototype.js makes the plugin to crash and take IE down with it. I really hope we don’t have to try to solve this issue, or are forced to strip prototype.js till it’s working. And to be honest, it would only solve the problems in our website. There are many Web2.0 applications in the web, and especially since Ruby on Rails relies heavily on the prototype.js and includes it by default, these QuickFIND users are going to experience more and more IE crashes. Even IE7 crashes just like that.
If we have to go down the harder road, I will definitely report back my success in debugging prototype.js. Right now, we’re waiting on customer’s opinion and hoping for the best.
I could find only couple of sources of the same problem:
Source 1,
Source 2