The infamous IE “Operation Aborted” bug fixed.

The “Operation Aborted” bug is a pretty embarrassing one, even by IE’s low standards.

Very broadly, this is how the bug is triggered.

• The HTML file is being parsed.
• Script is executing.
• The script attempts to add, or remove an element from an unclosed non-parent DOM element.

IE8 b1 now has sort of fixed this, by converting this from a complete runtime crash to a (non-modal) exception.

Microsoft and the botched anti-aliasing.

Microsoft India today launched a legal community called LegalAdda with a rather interesting looking logo.

The not-so-cool white artifacts around the logo are a result of a botched anti-aliasing combined with the absence of an alpha transparency in GIF images. The same logo viewed against a white background looks a lot better.

To fix this rookie mistake, Microsoft must use PNG images, which do have alpha transparency but poor IE support, or anti-alias the image against the planned background color (orange).

Edit: It may not be Microsoft’s site after all.

IE8 passes the ACID2 Test.

ACID2 is a test case designed by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in browsers.

For a browser to pass this test, this is how the test page should be rendered.

Internet Explorer 8, the much hated browser, has surprisingly passed this test.

Employee visibility index.

This is an experiment to find out the employee visibility index for various IT companies.

To figure that out, I used Google search result count for the string “I work at X” (X being the company name).

The results are pretty consistent with what I was expecting. What is stunning is that the 4 Indian IT majors together manage only 19 Google results.