Monday, January 15, 2007

Google Cache Locks Browser (Almost)

This is a nasty Google search as it actually may kill your browser – use at your own risk:

cache:mentaldischarge.com

What happens, as Kathryn M. pointed out to me, is that MentalDischarge.com was once a normal, non-password protected site. However, they now show a password popup. So Kathryn went to check the Google cache for the site, but Google opened the popup as well – and in fact this time at Google, whenever Kathryn closed the popup, it would reappear (not even Alt+F4-ing it worked), until she finally killed Firefox using Windows task manager.

I was actually able to get rid of the box by hitting Escape in fast succession, but this may be the first Google search I saw that kills someone’s browser... though thinking about it, I guess any web page hack that kills someone’s browser (say, some weird JavaScript that triggers a fatal Internet Explorer bug) may be “forwarded” by Google when you use the cache operator on that URL.

[Thanks Kathryn!]

Google Cache Locks Browse ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

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