One error message that plagued Internet Explorer 7, but that won't make it into the final version of Internet Explorer 8 refers to "operation aborted" messages. In IE7, operation aborted errors, marked by the associated dialog box featured in the screenshot on the left, prevented users from surfing certain websites, serving navigation error screens instead. IE7 simply failed to offer any way around the error, preventing the accessing of specific websites affected by a HTML parsing bug. However, with the next iteration of the Internet Explorer browser, end users will no longer face the operation aborted dialog box, starting with IE8 Beta 1.

"What caused the operation aborted error? The operation aborted dialog in Internet Explorer 7 is triggered by an HTML parsing exception that occurs when all the following specific conditions are met: the HTML file is being parsed, script is executing and the executing script attempts to add, or remove an element from an unclosed ancestor in the markup tree (not including the script block's immediate parent element)," explained Travis Leithead, Program Manager IE8 Object Model.

Essentially, what happens is that a child container HTML element attempts to alter its parent container element via integrated script code. Microsoft revealed that the bug is directly connected with the innerHTML and the appendChild methods. When Internet Explorer 7 came across a script block featuring inline scripts designed to create new elements, while at the same time delivering them as an addition to the BODY, it failed to continue parsing the HTML if the parser had to deal with the new item before coming across the closing BODY tag.

"In Internet Explorer 8, our goal is to change the behavior that previously caused the following problems: the operation aborted error was a modal dialog. The dialog was not actionable by any user; and dismissing the operation aborted dialog caused Internet Explorer to navigate to an error page. This prevented any potential debugging of the affected page. When the HTML parser throws the operation aborted exception, rather than announce this error to the world, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 discreetly tucks this information away into the list of script errors associated with the webpage and stops parsing HTML and running script at that point," Leithead explained.