How is it possible for one site to crash my Internet Explorer/Netscape?

For the longest time, Gamespot(www.gamespot.com) worked just fine, with full graphics and animation. About two months ago, it stopped working completely.

Well, not completely.

I get the text of the page, but the graphics all come up blank. If I use Internet Explorer(6.0), it crashes the explorer and closes down to a safer mode.

If I use Netscape, it doesn’t crash, but none of the pictures load.

The ads on the page work fine, since they come from other servers. Only Gamespot.com(and it’s subpages) won’t work.

I run Windows 98, on a 500 mhz Celeron Processor, with 128 meg memory. Remember, everything else on the internet works just fine, as did this site until recently. Now, it is completely kaput.

Any idea how this can happen? Oh, I tried turning off my firewall, but it made no difference.

The site’s Flash intro may be causing the problem. Try installing the latest version of the Flash Player from Macromedia.

Nope. Flash works just fine.

It honestly seems to be something within the site. Oddly enough, the opening Flash animation is the only thing that works fine. It’s after that.

It just stopped working for some reason.

When I go to their site, I too see the Flash animation. I don’t see how to skip it though, like most sites have. There’s a note below the animation that says something like “if this ad shows up twice, click here for information on cookies”; when I click there, it gives me a help page about marking their site as “allowable” in one’s IE settings.

But I did that, and no difference. I don’t even get to a page where graphics should be loading, although there’s another URL at the top, like the “complete” GameSpot or something…

It’s quite simple for one site to crash a browser if it has a bad tag. I work with people who are in charge of testing the Mac IE Browser - it is a common occurrence for (ex) a malformed XLM tag to crash the browser. Basically, MacIE was responsible for fixing poorly formed HTML wherever it could - remove an external end tag here, delete a bad CSS reference there, etc.

That ain’t nothin’. There used to be several pages on Snopes.com which would “blue screen of death” my NT 4.0 SP 6a machine running IE 6.0, simply by clicking on the link to them. Now that is something that simply should not happen… :eek: