Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP crashes on querySelectorAll?

Go to the IE8 crash page

In IE8, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, a new and convenient method has been introduced by the name ‘querySelectorAll’ By using this method you can find DOM elements based on  CSS class names. Useful? Oh yeah, this could be very useful. But there seems to be an serious problem. Please take a look.

Browser crash
We found an possible problem by using some Javascript. It is possible to crash the browser by using querySelectorAll. We can do this with three lines of Javascript code.

We call the document.querySelectorAll. As result we get a so called static Node List. I have no idea what a static Node List is, but I guess it is a kind of object.
Or is it an array? For instance this static Node List has a length property. So it is some native thing. Half Array , half Object.

Now we try to do a little loop through the elements of this node list. That is all. The browser crashes instantly. Or to be more correct: the tab pane crashes. The browser doesn’t actually crash. This seems a serious error. I don’t know how serious. Is it only an annoying feature ore something more serious?

Example code

// Get the static Node List
var questions = document.querySelectorAll ( ".W4);

// Let's crash IE8
for (var el in questions)
	break;

We have an working example file. Please note that your IE8 browser could crash when you visit this example page. So be careful please.
Go to the IE8 crash page

We tested this issue on three different machines, all Windows XP and IE8.  Please test this on your machine and let us know what you find. This code doesn’t do any harm as far as we know, it only crashes the browser.

James Hopkins of http://idreamincode.co.uk/ has confirmed this bug and has filed it on the Microsoft feedback pages  right here.

Be sure to run IE8 on Windows XP. That is the fatal combination. IE8 on Windows Vista won’t crash.

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