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My two hats are conflicted:

As a technology lead and entrepreneur, this is a disaster, and I'd have to ask serious questions if anyone on my team were to go anywhere near it.

As a developer, LOL.




Ok honestly, while you may lol, this is just a IE6 bug. I have a more generic function that will guarantee to crash ANY browser... Ok won't crash it, but it won't be responsive for a few days.


Interesting. Is it possible to share it here?


Absolutely... give me some time though I have to find it. Its a special regular expression where basically the regex engine can't decide which greedy quantifier to use leading in an insanely long evaluation. I opened a firefox bug for it a while back.

Ok found the link:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520086

Strangely this does not crash google chrome. Impressive!!!!

Err, correction, the regex now runs reasonably fast in the most recent of regex engines but I think on a long enough string it should still fail.

The string "dead:parrot(skit = 123372398547895743957574395743957439579435" now kills the browser.

However, unlike firefox in which regex runs in C space not JS space, google chrome/chromium recognizes that the page is unresponsive completely and kills the process, only the one process is unresponsive the rest of the browser works. Good job google!

Edit: This will kill Opera, Firefox (any), IE (any)




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