Mark Wong’s bits of the interweb

I was updating a site when I kept getting this error popup in IE6 and IE7. What made it even more annoying was that it was intermittent, but it only ever appeared in pages where there was a flash video player in it.

There wasn’t anything obvious in the pages to trigger the error, and only found out the cause with help from Google.

The solution recommended by Microsoft isn’t particular useful - Upgrade to IE8. Genius. There’s more info further down the page and a link to a good blog post describing the problem and proper workarounds to it.

It seems to be caused by javascript trying to append/remove elements to an unclosed parent container. You might have some js within the page trying to execute and adding/removing elements before the parent container has finished being parsed by IE.

I ended up moving moving the sifr and swfobject scripts to execute after the window.onload event rather than being inline. It’s a bit annoying as you get a bit of flicker when the replacements happen, but it’s better than crashing horribly.

Added so I can refer to it if I ever come across this again in the future.