How to Make Internet Explorer 6 Crash Instantly
It's definitely no Konami code.
Most of you are likely to be running one of the most recent versions of your browser of choice, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari; so hopefully this little bug won't take your browser down.
It's been discovered and now popularly reported that Internet Explorer 6 can be crashed by simply pointing the browser to:
ms-its:%F0:
Those without IE6 still lingering in their systems can get a demonstration of what happens in the video below.
KrebsonSecurity explains that this bug is the result of a pointer overflow in IE6 and the crash does not appear to work in newer versions of the browser.
Interestingly, it seems that this bug was found and reported to Microsoft back in 2004, but has yet to be patched. At the time, Microsoft engineers supposed believed there were no severe security consequences of this bug, leaving it a fix for a service pack – but that fix never arrived.
While the true damage of this flaw isn't severe, it could still cause many annoyances if malware (or a prankster) were to change the default start page to "ms-its:%F0:", rendering the browser unusable without a more advanced IE option tweak.
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Hothr Maybe if people post that in enough links and web-pages we can euthanize IE6 and not have to wait for it's slow death.Reply -
Computer_Lots Die IE6, DIE!!!Reply
My company FINALLY "upgraded" to IE7 a couple of months ago, after IE8 came out. I don't get it. IE8 is faster, more stable and more secure than IE7. Why would we upgrade to that??? Another one of the joys of working for a large company. -
NapoleonDK In related news: IE6 is lame.Reply
Move along folks, nothing to see here.
(On another note, does anyone actually hit the "Send error report" button? -
amasen He's spreading the word...Reply
Make sure to put in redirects for IE6 only...
Let the death of IE 6 be a universal effort. -
ljbade I think those websites that use Javascript to detect IE6 and display a message because they no longer support it, should instead change it to crash IE6. Much stronger message if you don't care about cutting off your IE6 audience.Reply -
Tomtompiper ReplyOn another note, does anyone actually hit the "Send error report" button?
Are you trying to give us all RSI?
All joking aside I don't, on my current system I don't get very many crashes. And when I do it displays a log which I copy and paste then e-mail in. -
mayne92 stoppostingcrapnewsWhy did you this crap article?This is so damn old and there's really no point posting this article.Everybody knows IE6 is crap so why bother?QQ loserReply -
CrashOverride90 IE6 is old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, and old.Reply
Oh and did I mention its Old? I forget easily
Seriously people need to dumb the old IE6