# Problems clicking through a javascript link using XP SP2?



## JBKing (Mar 23, 2002)

Help somebody!

I am having trouble surfing on some sites using IE6. It seems most times a hyperlink involves a "javascript:" command, it won't click through.

Here's an example. www.optionsxpress.com

I have one computer that will not click through on anything that says "javascript:" on the above site. The laptop at home works fine, and the pc at work is fine, but another pc at home won't work either. Both computers I'm having trouble with are running WinXP Service Pack 2. The laptop is XP without the SP2. I have all security settings the same in IE. I often have trouble clicking through at www.bestbuy.com on the Weekly Ad link. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. It too calls up a javascript command.

Any ideas?


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

i run sp2 and it just worked fine on firefox


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Just speculating - but maybe you've got a software incompatibility with SP2/IE6.

Are you running anything 3rd-party? Google/Yahoo toolbar, ad/spyware blockers, etc.?


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

I encountered the same problem with another site and Firefox. Others work fine. I am not sure if SP2 is in any way the culprit.


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## JBKing (Mar 23, 2002)

I tried Netscape, and I couldn't click through either. I'll try Firefox this weekend. Wonder if it's my router blocking something? That would be strange since I have a laptop running XP on the same network, sans SP2, that works fine. I'll also try the SP2 machine while bypassing the router, just to see. 

I took every security level in I.E. down to the red-flag bare minimum, and it still didn't work. :bang

Thanks for the responses, BTW.

The only thing I am running is Norton AntiSpam (which shouldn't matter) and Norton Antivirus. No firewall, other than the router itself blocking most ports. I do have WinXP SP2 popup block activated. Turning it off didn't help. Thought I would try that even though the link I mentioned is not a popup or new window.


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## pweezil (Oct 11, 2002)

JB,
Try removing the "e" between the "s" and the "x" and see what happens.

I think the correct link is: http://www.optionsxpress.com/


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## JBKing (Mar 23, 2002)

oops, corrected. The link was incorrect, even though it forwarded you to the correct site. Nevertheless, the problem is the same. Thanks, pweezil.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Well, I may have nailed it. The optionsexpress site's home page links all(?) call a Jscript function (AppendSessionID) that is not just in a stand-alone file, it's dynamically loaded by a stand-alone file! I suspect this is done so that "we" can't see the function's code (not that this method will stop someone that actually wants to see it). However, such techniques open security holes that may be closed by SP2.

For those that care, here's the sequence:

The home page loads general.js:

general.js does:
/* Include append_session.js */
var s;
s = ""; 
document.write(s);

This puts the content of append_session.js into the document, and that's probably where the AppendSessionID function resides. If it's not in that file, it's in one of the other files that they load the same way.


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## JBKing (Mar 23, 2002)

Well, that makes sense :rolling: to me. I tried it without going through the router, and it still didn't work. Then I tried Firefox and it didn't work either.

What about kwajr who said it worked for him while running SP2?


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Well, I've got no idea what Firefox is, so really can't comment.


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## pweezil (Oct 11, 2002)

JB, I'm using Firefox with SP2 and it works. Do you have the Enable Javascript box checked in Tools>Options>Web Features?


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## JBKing (Mar 23, 2002)

pweezil, yes I do.


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

SimpleSimon said:


> Well, I've got no idea what Firefox is, so really can't comment.


simon you should really try firefox best browser ever http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Thanks but no thanks.

Among other things, I design web sites for the 90%ers. Most companies quit spending the extra K$$$ to deal with backwater browsers years ago.

I don't want to frustrate myself with something that may be good, but that I can't use on a daily basis.


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

SimpleSimon said:


> Thanks but no thanks.
> 
> Among other things, I design web sites for the 90%ers. Most companies quit spending the extra K$$$ to deal with backwater browsers years ago.
> 
> I don't want to frustrate myself with something that may be good, but that I can't use on a daily basis.


well it is not backwater its mozilla latest and probally the best regarded browser now and the only thing it doesnot work with is msn stuff like the zone and updates


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

If you comply to standards---and you should---Firefox will work on your site. It is hardly "backwater" and I would think twice before paying for a web site that only ran well on IE. It is not a question of what I use it is a question of lost or frustrated customers who cannot use IE or choose not to.


The site BTW works fine for em in Firefox 0.9.3 with SP2.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

You miss my point. Right or wrong, good or bad, Microsoft won the browser war.

It makes no sense for anyone to spend extra money developing, or even testing, for the other browsers. If a customer is lost because they insist on using some weird browser, oh well. How much did that cost vs. the money to try to support oddball browsers? This attitude came about mainly because of what Netscape did between, what was it, v4 and v6 when they decided to try to go their own way? Yeah, they had some backing from W3C, but still lost.

If they work, fine, if not, too bad.


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

I think you miss the point that others are making. Yes Microsoft is the market leader. but that does not mean that the "war" is over. In fact that is probably a poor description since it is not a situation where there is only one browser standing. But with all of the security concerns out there a lot of personal and even corporate users are looking at alternatives. It is not so much that the alternatives are "better" just that they are not as heavily targeted as Microsoft. 

And what at least I was discussing was writing web sites that comply to standards. I agree it would be silly to tailor a web site to Opera or Firefox. But I think it is shortsighted indeed to write them that do not comply with standards so that they can run on a wide variety of browsers. 

It is all opinion. But I think that Microsoft's market share will start to slip again. that does not mean it will disappear or even drop behind some other browser. but I would still prefer my web site to work with other browsers.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

And that's fine, Chief - we each have opinions, and I respect yours.

Mine is based on having watched the computer industry grow and evolve for over 30 years, and I say the browser war is over. Heck, even AOL bailed out, and they're certainly no fan of Microsoft.

Univac, DEC and Honeywell tried to say the war against IBM wasn't over. Where are they now? Amdahl/Fujitsu, Hitachi/NAS, and even Magnuson all did well - because they went with the de facto standard - IBM. Cray did well on the super-computer side - because they were CDC-compatible. AMD and Intel, same thing.

How about PC vs. Mac? Apple has been reduced to running ads that show how much prettier their machines are vs. a PC square-box. But heck - even the slim-line PC's aren't very popular. People are just comfortable with clunky boxes that run Windows and MSIE. I'm not saying it's right, but it is reality.

Once you hit, say, 75%, it's over. It doesn't matter who's better. MSIE is running around 90% of the total page hits. That's just the way it is.

You are free to spend your money ensuring a site meets standards. But the common approach in the industry right now is to design to the standards, but when it gets to the down-n-dirty, and you start testing, all that's used for a platform is IE.

When I used to write IBM mainframe operating system mods, my boss didn't give a rat's ass about whether it would work on a S370/168MP. As long as it worked on his S360/40, and would probably work on a S360/65, that was it - no more time (money) would be spent. And nothing has changed.

If you've got programmers sharp enough to pick the correct path to make something work, cool. I actually do that when I can. However, most so-called programmers out there can't code their way out of a paper bag, and if they want to keep their jobs, they're going to make the site work for the boss - and he's got Wintel and MSIE, not a Mac or Mozilla.

Aside, just to show nothing changes: Back when the 80386 first hit, I remember some college kids raving about how Intel invented this neat new virtual storage paging stuff. I damn near had a hernia laughing over it. IBM (via Cambridge) had what is basically the same type of architecture in use printing the hospital invoice for their birth, and their parent's payroll checks to pay for it.


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

You are right Simon the best thing we can do is agree to disagree. But I don't see it as war between competing architectures or technologies as you do. there is quite a bit of difference between not writing mainframe programs so they will run on other mainframes and not designing web sites so that they will run on different browsers. 

But if you really write to the standard I see no problem. Only a very tiny percentage of web sites wont run on Firefox. The only one that comes to mind is Windows Update.

trust me it is not like the Web TV browser built into the Dishplayer that at one point could not view even the Dish Network web site.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

There are similarities and differences. But it is more similar than different - when writing a web site, you ARE writing programs to run on "other" machines - within a certain API (some Univacs could run some IBM 360 stuff).

Windows Update probably is deliberately locked into MSIE - that would be the MS way. 

As for WebTV, what a disaster! I personally "wasted" at least $100,000 of client money because they wanted their site to run on it. I made it happen as much as possible. Then, 6 months later, we looked at the stats and found something less than 1% of the hits were from WebTV. End of story, and they said "never again".

Side story: The power of having a single standard architecture. I was consulting to AT&T in Denver about 10 years ago - cleaning up their storage management - and it came to our attention that a plant in the Midwest was running their payroll program from punch cards. I don't mean that the data, I mean the binary program itself was read into a card reader every pay period! The program had been last compiled in 1966, and nobody there had any idea where the source code was, or even that it was possible to not read the cards each time - that the "cards" could live on disk. We educated them.  But the point is that a software investment had lasted over 25 years. the downside is that those same things also caused the Y2K issues.


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## cdru (Dec 4, 2003)

Microsoft won the first browser war with Netscape. However, things are just starting to get rolling with BWII. Firefox has doubled it's userbase in 9 months, now up to 14%. It's still small, but many trade mags are warming up more and more to Firefox. As Msft's code continues to constantly get exploited, I think more and more people will start looking for alternatives. Once Firefox starts making significant inroads into corporate America, then the big battles will be fought again.

It will be interesting to see what SP2 does to all this. If it does it's job and patch the swiss cheese browser holes, then IE might win back some of those lost users. If however the holes just change locations, I would expect to see that 14% continue to increase over the next year or two.

I know of no business that would want to purposefully exclude any demographic that consisted of 14% of the population, yet many sites still only function under IE. Even a basic check to see if the page loads isn't that hard.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Well, I just checked couple of sites.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
http://www.doctor-html.com/agent_stats/

The first shows Mozilla at 15% and it's been rising just over the last few months. That number appears to be number of machines as opposed to number of page hits. Mozilla seems to be picking up the IE5 laggards, which I'll guess would mean the folks that were and are scared of IE6. IE6 has stayed steady at just over 70%. So, Mozilla could pick up some of the remaining IE5 users, but that's probably going to be all.

The second site shows it by usage (which is what I rely on) which shows IE at 85-90%, while the third one seems to confirm both of the others - allowing for the second one to be old data.

In conclusion I think we're just seeing a short-term bounce, and MSIE will regain some market share as opposed to the other way around.

But of course, either way, read this: http://www.pantos.org/atw/f-35448.html which says basically the numbers are a crapshoot, depending on where they come from.

Oh - and it's not a purposeful exclusion in the sense that the companies don't WANT the "oddballs", it's just that it's not economically smart to spend the money.

Finally, how does FireFox do at rendering Microsoft's DHTML and so forth? If it does a good job, then there's a chance it'll survive. If it's like NS5 or 6 (I forget which one went out to right field), then it'll die.


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## firephoto (Sep 12, 2002)

It's sad that people still use tools like frontpage to make terrible code. And your 90% comment is in error when Mozilla products currently have 14% as someone just stated above.  My ISP and soon to be ex ISP uses frontpage to make there webpage and it has some nifty menus that don't work with a non IE browser. Oh and you really should keep up on the tech news. AOL just released Netscape 7.2 which is based off of the newer faster Mozilla code.

From the little bit I've read about XP SP2 it seems to do a little processing on all internet traffic no matter what browser you use and what settings you have on or off. My mom has been getting these security pop ups on her machine and she uses Firefox. This is with all the new firewall/securtiy/whatever they added turned off with the controls they give you but XP still seems to be "watching" what you surf which it didn't used to do. Also I noticed some images not being displayed but this again seemed to be due to the new "pop up blocker" that I had to find and shut off. Not that MS would do anything intentionally that could complicate how another browser works but they seem to have done a good job of it with SP2. 

The no more XP day for mom is getting close. Maybe if I win the lotto I'll just buy her one of those new nifty iMacs.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

If you actually read my last post you would see how both the 90% and 14% numbers could be correct.

And 7.2 is old news, hardly more than a security fix release. Hmmm. wait a minute - I thought only MSIE had security holes. 

As for FrontPage, it writes pretty good code. Used to be bad, but has improved dramatically over the last couple of releases. And just like the rest of the commercial world, it doesn't much care about the oddball browsers either. I'm not familiar with the menus you speak of, athough I DO know of some third-party DHTML ones that only work with IE. Just because a page has FrontPage footprints in it doesn't mean it's ALL FP code. 

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.


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## firephoto (Sep 12, 2002)

Umm.... that was an article about how they were getting ready to release 7.2 which was released mid August, 3 weeks ago... anyway.... Oh and it's terrible they fix security problems in a matter of hours or a day or so isn't it but..... I really don't care though. 

And as much as you keep saying it, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, whatever are not oddball browsers but wave the MS flag as you choose.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

You seem to have missed the publication date of the article. It's from over 3 months ago, so they are as bad or worse than MS in plugging their security holes.

As for "oddball" the only one that is escaping from that label is Mozilla - and the jury remains out on the rematch. Remember, they were #1 at one time and then fell into nowhere land when MSIE hit the streets.

BTW, I'm not particularly a fan of Microsoft, but that's where the money is, and I like to keep my mortgage paid.


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

SimpleSimon said:


> There are similarities and differences. But it is more similar than different - when writing a web site, you ARE writing programs to run on "other" machines - within a certain API (some Univacs could run some IBM 360 stuff).
> 
> W


I agree that writing code for web sites menas it must run on many platforms. But mainframe code was generally written for specific users. May people who asked for mainframe apps had no interest in allowing it to run on other machines. Whewn I worked for Sperry/unisys we never officially supported any of the attempts to get ithe product to run softwre written for other platforms.

There was however a fair amount of third party stuff that ran on multipe platforms which we did distribute.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Agreed. Maybe the parallel that brings it out is that when writing a web site, Windows vs. Linux server differences can be an issue - similar to writing say COBOL on a mainframe. The client side would be browser type vs. terminal type. That is, a mainframe program written for the 327x architecture would need a lot of work (or an interface/emulation program) to run with VT100-based terminals.

One thing I must say, with the exception of 1-2 posts from right field, this has been a pleasant discussion. 

We'll see how it plays out - and if FireFox gains ground, but needs extra work from the web site, it'll mean more money in my pocket, so I'm all for it.


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

well callit what you will but its our job to let people know there is a choice the browser is one thing most peopledont eevn know they have a choice with it needs to be pulled from the os but i think if you sat people down and let them try both they would like the tabbed browsing and pop up blocking not to mention plug ins and tool bar add ons some of us cant live without


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Well, it's not MY job to tell people about 3rd party browsers that might cause support issues, confusion, or whatever.

As for the feature differences, they are all available for MSIE as 3rd-party add-ins - but refer to my previous sentence. Note that I am quite happy with my Google add-ins.


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

Actually I have far fewer issues with Firefox than I had with IE. At upgrade time it can be problematic but otherwise it is more reliable and faster than IE. I am not on an anti IE crusade. I just think that web sites should be designed to be viewed on different platforms==so long as the platforms conform to standards. that is the whole point of standards.


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## HappyGoLucky (Jan 11, 2004)

Personally, should I encounter a website that doesn't work correctly with Firefox, I simply don't bother with that website anymore. I find that most corporate sites work fine, more are using standard methods to accomplish tasks. Proprietary crap becomes harder to maintain over time, so sticking with accepted standards is actually cheaper and more efficient. Couple that with the wide growth of tools like Macromedia Flash (which works exceptionally well with Firefox) and the need for IE becomes far less.

I would have to question the competency of any web developer who didn't even know about the existence of Firefox.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

HappyGoLucky said:


> ... I would have to question the competency of any web developer who didn't even know about the existence of Firefox.


I simply didn't know Mozilla's new name.  It falls into the "who cares" category - about the same as "XP" being the new name for "NT 5".


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

HappyGoLucky said:


> Personally, should I encounter a website that doesn't work correctly with Firefox, I simply don't bother with that website anymore. I find that most corporate sites work fine, more are using standard methods to accomplish tasks. Proprietary crap becomes harder to maintain over time, so sticking with accepted standards is actually cheaper and more efficient. Couple that with the wide growth of tools like Macromedia Flash (which works exceptionally well with Firefox) and the need for IE becomes far less.
> 
> I would have to question the competency of any web developer who didn't even know about the existence of Firefox.


thank you my thought exactly


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

SimpleSimon said:


> I simply didn't know Mozilla's new name.  It falls into the "who cares" category - about the same as "XP" being the new name for "NT 5".


well its the latest thing that every one cares about just research but any way they just ned to unbundle xp by the way in every pc i build i set firefox as default and take it off the desktop the only time they should nedd it is when running msn games www.zone.com which use microsoft code not standard or update and when you use update it loads ie anyway


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

SimpleSimon said:


> I simply didn't know Mozilla's new name.  It falls into the "who cares" category - about the same as "XP" being the new name for "NT 5".


It is not Mozilla's new name. It is a different product from the same organization. Mozilla (sometimes called Seamonkey) is an integrated browser and email product. Firefox is a stand alone browser.


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## HappyGoLucky (Jan 11, 2004)

Geronimo said:


> It is not Mozilla's new name. It is a different product from the same organization. Mozilla (sometimes called Seamonkey) is an integrated browser and email product. Firefox is a stand alone browser.


Yep. Think of Mozilla as the suite of applications, including email, calender, browser, etc. SeaMonkey is the codename for the development of the suite. The browser component is Firefox, the email component is Thunderbird, both are available seperate from the suite and in fact are developed seperately, so the features and workings of Firefox may not be the same as the browser component in SeaMonkey.

Then there are the official builds of the products, which include nightlies as well as "Release" editions, and builds from third-party developers who optimize and compile the code for various platforms and systems.

With the codebase nearing 1.0 Release, the Firefox builds are now so stable and compatible the only time I ever have to run IE is for Windows Updates. It is very very rare to come across a website that doesn't operate correctly. I have Java, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave, Quicktime, Acrobat, RealPlayer, MS Office, MS Media Player, etc. all working as plugins without any problems. And it is far more usable and configurable than IE.


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