IE ‘operation aborted’ error

One of the most under­rated prac­tice for a web devel­oper is to con­stantly check the web page on all the browsers and make sure every­thing is ren­der­ing as you expect it to. It becomes more impor­tant for dynamic con­tent pages such as blogs where new scripts, wid­gets can irk a spe­cific browser. More often it is with IE and the prob­lem is wide­spread since many web devel­op­ers pre­fer Macs (and really very few peo­ple have IE on macs), Mozil­las and Safaris; often ignor­ing IE. How­ever, the bot­tom line is to do fre­quent browser checks to catch the error before a reader does.

One of the com­mon IE bugs that creeps in is the ‘Inter­net Explorer can­not open the web­site .….; Oper­a­tion aborted!’ error. Lately, it had sur­faced in my blog because of an embed­ded CNN video that used javascript inside body tag.

The rea­son for this error is that javascript inter­feres with the load­ing of page by try­ing to load ele­ments before the page has been fully parsed. The com­mon solu­tions are to move the script out­side the body etc. How­ever, in blogs where the page is dynam­i­cally gen­er­ated and I don’t want to put in too fancy hacks, the eas­ier work around is to do a con­di­tional browser check for IE and load the script only if it is a non-IE browser else dis­play a sim­ple link.

For eg.

<![if !IE]>
<script .. /> /* let the script load if non IE browser */
<![endif]>
<!--[if IE]> /* only IE will parse this and display a normal link */
see this <a href="">link</a>
<![endif]-->

For more infor­ma­tion on browser checks, fol­low this.

This will, of course, work only if you are fine with not embed­ding the cul­prit video in IE. I hate hav­ing to tweak my pages for IE but then, I hate see­ing the pages break too and would rather put in that extra effort for ensur­ing wider browser com­pat­i­bil­ity because we are far from wit­ness­ing IE get­ting extinct any­time soon. The javascript issue can be caused by videos, google maps etc. So, keep an eye when you pub­lish a new post with js con­tent enabled.

P.S. — A good tool to check how your design ren­ders on var­i­ous browsers with­out hav­ing all the browsers installed is Browser-Shots. It has a mul­ti­tude of browsers to select from and should do a quick job for you.

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