As I mentioned yesterday folks with Internet Explorer 8 are having difficulties viewing eagletribune.com. As a few of you have noted, IE 8 actually has problems with lots of sites, but it’s still the most widely-used browser so we’re trying to find a way to fix it on our end. We don’t want to lose any of you just because of a browser compatability problem.
Of course, you could switch to a less problematic browser like Google Chrome or Firefox (I highly recommend Chrome, it’s clean and super fast). But let’s face it, you shouldn’t have to change your browser to view our site. So, we’re working on a fix. In the meantime, here’s an explanation sent this morning from our parent company’s Vice President of Technology and Internet Operations Chris Muldrow:
We’ve been working on a problem that a few papers have reported where Internet Explorer version 8 crashes when trying to load our websites.
We’ve isolated the problem to a bug in IE 8 with a tool called the Smart Screen Filter. This filter, which is designed to pop up a message if a Web site is on a list of “malware” sites maintained by Microsoft, apparently doesn’t work correctly. In certain circumstances, it crashes the browser, even when hitting non-malware sites.
The IE 8 crashes we’ve observed can be stopped by having the user disable Smart Screen Filter. Of course, I’m never terribly comfortable telling users to turn off browser security features even if those features cause crashes.
We’re researching a way to mitigate the problem that won’t require the browser setting switch.
Noah R. Bombard is the new media editor for The Eagle-Tribune in North Andover. He is a former award-winning newspaper and magazine editor who has been covering news in Massachusetts since 1997.