Tech Tips: Operation Aborted – Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site

Made Essential Reading on 13 April 2010 Mike Harrison

Ever had this ridiculous error? Ridiculous because it provides absolutely no clues as to why the web page failed to load even with debugging switched on.

Main Symptom:

• your website works fine in both IE8, IE7 and Firefox but some users report it failed to load anything
• it turns out that these users are attempting to view the website in IE6 or an earlier version

Cause:

• a conflict between mootools and swfobject

If your webpage code initialises the swfobject before mootools finishes loading then the webpage will throw up the above error in IE6 or earlier. There are no signs of anything going wrong in other versions.
Fix:

• add the defer attribute to the script that actions swfobject e.g.

<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer">

• modify your code and move all references to the swfobject to just before the </head> tag e.g.

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="js/swfobject.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer">
/* script replaces static banner (for non-flash brownsers) with flash banner
uses swfobject.js above
*/
var flashvars = {};
var params = {};
params.quality = "high";
var attributes = {};
attributes.align = "right";
swfobject.embedSWF("ss.swf", "banner", "760", "120", "9.0.0", "expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params, attributes);
</script>
</head>

and ensure all your mootools code appears before it!