Webmasters Urgest To Remove Sitemeter Due To Crashes

Fix: IE7 with Sitemeter: Operation aborted. This news is primarily addressed to those webmasters who experience a similar problem with Sitemeter.

If your web page contains a Sitemeter counter, Internet Explorer users eventually see an "Operation aborted" error message. Once they click OK, the whole page disappears and is replaced by a blank page.

Quick fix: If you don't need Sitemeter so much and you want to simplify the life of 1/2 of your visitors, just remove the Sitemeter portion of your HTML code. Otherwise, continue to read.

The behavior began yesterday because Sitemeter updated their scripts. Unfortunately, they forgot about a bug of the Internet Explorer that has been causing a similar "Operation aborted" error with many scripts (for example, this blog used to have a "welcome message" that identified your place: it used to crash MSIE, too). See a technical explanation of the bug at

Microsoft Knowledge Base 927917.

If a Javascript tries to append a body element to an object that is not directly embedded below , but it is within an internal table or a similar hierarchy instead, the operation will fail. In other words, all Javascripts that appear inside tables and other modules are at risk.

This bug should be fixed in Internet Explorer 8. It is also absent in Firefox 3.0.1 and Opera 9.51 which are also faster than MSIE 7 and which are recommended to the visitors.

Meanwhile, there are several methods to fix the problem on the webmaster's side. One of them is to use the simplified, script-free counter.

The disadvantage is that the icon is actually not displayed now, due to another bug. But you will see all the information about your visitors, except for the referring URL. They are counted.

Alternatively, you may study the Microsoft pages above and try to modify your script. For example, you can insert a condition that identifies the browser and if it is MSIE, you will run no script - or the simplified one without Javascript.

If you can move your Sitemeter Javascript out of all the tables etc., good for you. What I personally did on my blogger.com blog - hopefully temporarily - is a rather extreme version of this solution:

Go to the dashboard, choose "Layout", "Edit HTML", scroll to the bottom, and include the ordinary full Sitemeter Javascript (with the counter.js source from the Sitemeter website) right before at the end of the HTML template. Preview and save the template. The counter will appear at the very bottom of your blog. Don't forget to remove (or uncomment) the old copy of the Sitemeter from the bulk of your web page.

Sitemeter will hopefully fix this bug soon and we will be able to move the counter wherever we like. Moreover, I hope that Microsoft will fix this general bug of MSIE browsers.

And finally, one more advise for the visitors of the Internet who encounter important crashing websites with the Sitemeter (whose webmasters haven't yet fixed the problem) and who can't or don't want to change their IE7 browser: Add Sitemeter among the restricted sites.

1. Open "Tools" / "Options" in the menu
2. Click "Security" tab
3. Select "Restricted Sites"
4. Click "Sites" button
5. Under "Add this website to this zone", enter "*.sitemeter.com" without the quotes
6. Click "Add" button
7. Close windows using "Close" or "OK", not "Cancel".

After that, and without a restart, Sitemeter's thwartage is thwarted.

Reported by The Reference Frame

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