Friday, March 27, 2009

Internet Explorer script error: Line 53, Character 3

Anybody know what the heck this is? I've been seeing it over and over again on websites of all sorts. It appears whenever I try to close the page I'm on. The above example is from Gort's Gort42, which is a Blogspot blog. I'm also seeing it on Gareth's Another Chance to See, which is also a Blogspot blog, as well as Isis the Scientist's On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess (NEW ScienceBlogs version) - which is not a Blogspot blog. On many other sites I'm not seeing the problem at all.

The remedy that I have found is to click the "Yes" button, or sometimes the "No" button, or sometimes both, about a gazillion times. The fun part comes on the gazillion-and-first click, after the message has closed and you've just randomly clicked on whatever happened to be under it.

I know, I know: Who uses Internet Explorer anymore? Use a real browser, like Firefox! Well, I use Internet Explorer, and so do a heck of a lot of other people. And as far as I know, Firefox hasn't resolved this problem, though their open-source philosophy suggests that I should say that Firefox users haven't resolved that problem.

I tried looking information up on this problem the other day but could only find scattered bits and pieces. I'm guessing that this is another one of those little bugs inadvertently written into Internet Explorer that requires an elaborate and precise workaround and creates an incompatibility with stuff that works perfectly well in other browsers that hasn't had the workaround applied. But that's just a guess. Maybe on my days off I'll look into this more closely.

5 comments:

...tom... said...

...

I have never seen that one. So no help here.

My biggest computer complaint is that . . .my workplace has decided to block blogspot.com..!! How dare they..!!


Good luck with that one...


...tom...
.

Isis the Scientist said...

Errors? On my blog? Oh noes!!!!

Gregory Hunt said...

It's marginally comforting to know that I'm not the only person suffering from this issue. I run a couple of blogs on Blogger and both of them are suffering from the same issue precisely as you described it. I will be monitoring the comments to this post to see if someone provides a solution.

Scot Griffin said...

I think I found your answer.

I was having the same problem. I found something saying that the Google toolbar was causing the problem, and I have it installed and enabled. The post I found said to uninstall the Google toolbar, but I found that I can stop getting the error by disabling the toolbar by right clicking on an empty spot ont he tool bars at the top of the browser to bring up the list of add-ons to explorer and left click to take away the check mark next to the google toolbar.

worked like a charm. when I re-enable the google toolbar, the problem happens again on all the same websites.

hope it works for you.

Lance said...

I'm getting this on a video site I just created. Apparently this only seems to happen on pages that have embeded videos from a certain site, this was driving me nuts too!

I wonder if it has something to do with the source code, but I'm almost certain that videos are to blame here.

Lance