Tag: internet explorer

Really Purging a YouTube Iframe in Internet Explorer

I’ve been working on a website where we display YouTube videos in a modal overlay. This seems simple: absolutely position a div and centre YouTube’s iframe embed within it. When the user tires of the video remove the iframe and hide or remove the div. It works great, then I fired up Internet Explorer for testing.

In IE this is what appears in the Javascript console,  after the iframe is removed:

Errors in the IE Javascript Error Console.
These errors appear after html5player.js shouldn’t exist anymore.

With the iframe gone html5player.js and its code shouldn’t  exist anymore and therefore should not throw errors. It turns out that when an iframe is removed from a web page IE doesn’t completely purge the contents of the iframe from memory right away, if ever.

How do we fix it?

The errors occurred when using jQuery to set the innerHTML of the containing div to an empty string, so I started trying to explicitly remove the iframe’s DOM node using pure Javascript. Element.removeChild() the node instead of destroying it, so that didn’t kill the errors. The docs for IE’s removeNode() don’t specify if the node is held in memory, but the errors continued with it as well.

Some Googling turned up, (I forget where), that setting the iframe’s src attribute to an empty string might help. This makes sense because it’s the equivalent of navigating the iframe to a new page, which should unload any Javascript. Trying to set src=” worked, most of the time. When it didn’t work IE went crazy and became unusable.

In the end I took the approach of trying to wipe out the contents of the iframe as thoroughly as possible, first by changing the iframe’s src to an empty string, then by accessing the iframe’s DOM with Javascript and setting its document element to null. This did the trick. Here’s the function:

// note: modal is the div that contains the YouTube iframe
// jquery is used for some selecting, but the guts of the removal are pure Javascript

function purgeVideo() {
    // purge video must be called while the video is still displayed on the page, 
    // so doing a jQuery fadeOut(purgeVideo) may throw errors, (I think because 
    // fadeOut sets display:none before calling its callback).

    if( modal ) {
        // get the iframe, declare variables
        var ifr = $('iframe', modal), rifr;
        
        // if the iframe is found get the underlying DOM node from jQuery
        if ( ifr.length > 0 ) {
            rifr = ifr.get(0);
        }

        // make extra sure the DOM node exists before starting to work on it.
        if( rifr ) {
            // set src to '' to start removing YouTube and get around cross-domain access restrictions
            rifr.src = '';

            // now set the document element of the iframe to null, (I think this is IE-specific)
            if ( rifr.documentWindow ) {
                rifr.documentWindow.document = null;
                rifr.documentWindow = null;
            }

            // delete the iframe, (also removes it from DOM).
            delete rifr;
        }

        // this won't throw an error, even if the iframe is gone, (we're back to jQuery here).
        ifr.remove();

        // remove anything else, (titles, etc), from the modal overlay
        modal.html('');
    }

}

Generating Form Elements with Javascript in IE 10

There’s a DOM manipulation gotcha in IE10 that just got me, and Google didn’t help much, so I’m giving Google something to show anyone who has this problem in the future.

When you dynamically generate a form input in Internet Explorer 10 the you must set the type attribute before doing anything else to the element, otherwise any values you set will be ignored when submitting the form, and in some cases will not be displayed. When inspecting elements using IE’s developer tools, however, the correct value appears in the generated document tree.

So this works as expected:

var sub = document.createElement('input');
sub.setAttribute('type', 'submit');
sub.setAttribute('value', 'Submit Generated Button');


But this doesn't:

var sub = document.createElement('input');
sub.setAttribute('value', 'Submit Generated Button');
sub.setAttribute('type', 'submit');

This is particularly hard to catch with radio buttons and checkboxes, (this is what got me). Their default value is “on” which doesn’t tell me much, especially if you’re submitting an array of them.

Here’s a demo. The first button shows its value, (and submits its value), and the second shows, (and submits) the default of “Submit Query.”

The only documentation I found on this behaviour is a passing sentence in the createElement documentation at MSDN. When they say “then set the type property to the appropriate value in the next line of code” they’re serious about the next line of code.

Also, who chooses “Submit Query” as a default value for a submit button in 2013 anyway? Are they trying to confuse people? Shouldn’t it just be “Submit”?

Using Microsoft’s VPC Images with VMWare Fusion

We all know the sinking feeling when we have to test a website in Internet Explorer. You built the site, it looks beautiful in Firefox and maybe Safari too, but now you have to open up Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, and make sure it plays nice with all three of them. Even better, Microsoft has made it so that you can only have one version of IE installed on a computer at a time. True, you can use things like Multiple IEs or other similar products, but they never play quite right.

Fortunately, Microsoft has supplied us with Virtual PC images of Windows with Internet Explorer installed. Unfortunately, Virtual PC is a Windows-only program so you need a PC to run them on. Or do you?

You don’t! If you’re using OS X you can use VMWare Fusion to run those Microsoft VPC images, after a little tweaking. It is much easier if you have a copy of Windows available to you during the install process, (that’s how I did it), but I don’t believe this is an absolute necessity. Here’s how it works:

Basically, you need to download the VPC images, extract them, and convert them into VMWare Fusion virtual machines. It sounds trickier than it is.

First, download and extract the VPC images. If you can use Windows to do this it’s easy, (the images have self-extractors), if not try p7zip, (see instructions in this forum thread).

[edit: July 15, 2009]: Then, somehow, you have to convert your VHD files into VMC files. The easiest way to do this is to use Microsoft’s VPC to make a new virtual machine from the VHD files, but you do need windows to do that. You will be converting these .VMC files into VMWare native virtual machines.
[/edit]

To convert the VPC images to something else, use VMWare vCenter Converter. It’s a stand-alone program for Windows or Linux that easily converts VPC images to VMWare Fusion virtual machines, as well as several other formats. You can even choose between Fusion 1.x and Fusion 2.x. It will even install the VMWare tools pagkage for you. I did the conversion under Windows, but there’s probably a way to get the linux version to run under OS X, at least hopefully.

Once the conversion is complete, fire up OS X & VMWare Fusion and open your new Virtual PC image. There are some things that run on the first startup of each machine, give it a few minutes then hit cancel on all of the “Please insert the XP SP3 CD” messages that remain, it doesn’t seem to hurt Windows. I think it’s looking for a battery driver in my case, (maybe I should try to install the Bootcamp battery driver?).

That’s it, enjoy testing. I am able to run, slowly, all 3 IE versions with the Windows XP images, and my computer isn’t as slow as when I run only my Bootcamp Vista install under VMWare Fusion. I’m thrilled to have these 3 new debugging tools at my disposal.