Safari 4 on Windows crashes when you provide incorrect credentials

Sorry for the long title of this post. But it is the most accurate description of a problem we're having in a project at the moment. Safari 4 on Windows seems to crash in what I perceive to be a common use case. Here are the minimal steps that I came up with for reproducing the problem:

1. create a new web site in IIS


2. enable integrated authentication on this web site


3. connect to the new web site with Safari 4 for Windows


4. provide incorrect credentials

At this point Safari 4 crashes on my system.

Providing correct credentials allows us to continue. But in the application my team is building, we will often encounter another authentication problems later on.

• Safari pops up a log on box when we open a page from the same web site in an iframe. No matter which credentials we provide, we can't continue.

I've been searching whether this is a known problem for a while now. But I haven't found a single page that points out the problem we encountered here. Hence this simple write-up.

Has anyone had similar problems with Safari on Windows? If so, is there any way to work around the problem? Because as it is, we can't really support our application on Safari 4 on Windows. :-/

iframe.onload doesn't fire for ActiveX controls

Last week I had a few very frustrating days with the web interface of a new application we're building. The web application is basically allowing you to navigate websites as they were at a given moment in time.

The web application is built up from some panels with additional information and a main iframe hosting the actual web page. You type the URL of the page you want to see and presto, there you have it. On the side we'll show you all the other versions of that page we have available. Clicking on one of those versions will bring it up in the iframe.

So far, so good. The problems started when allowing the user to click links in the page that is showing in the iframe. We use a mix of rewriting the HTML before it's shown and intercepting the requests on the server, so that following links actually takes you to the destination as it was at the time that you were looking at. It might sound a bit complex, but it feels a but like time traveling. Imagine the wayback machine, with links working historically.

To update the information in the local panels we hook the onload event of the iframe. And that's where the problems started. Because on some of our systems, the onload event doesn't seem to fire when we open a PDF. It seems to only happen on IE, but not consistently on all our IE systems. A workaround with periodically inspecting the iframe also doesn't work, because somehow we can't even get the URL for the PDFs. And before you ask: yes, the PDFs are served from the same domain as the rest of the page.

It's really frustrating, because when the onload doesn't fire it breaks our UI logic. And the workarounds we've had to do are not pretty and slow the UI responsiveness way more than we'd like.

I've done some searching to see whether other people also had this problem. But of all the questions being posted on iframes, this doesn't seem to be a common occurence. That's why I post it here. Has anyone had the same problem? And if so, what was your solution?