Is a chunk of HTML and javascript that crashes IE rare? Unless my memory is faulty, I feel like we've come across code that crashes various IE versions a dozen times in the last few years. Reporting these bugs to Microsoft is practically unimaginable to me -- I wouldn't know where to start.
In the past week, I removed the last active (and crashing) Windows OS from a production machine and installed Ubuntu. Our Windows development lives on in sandboxes. We're liking Ubuntu.
I doubt that "Microsoft blatantly hung up" on them. MS have their issues, but rogue dickishness hasn't been one of them for a long time. (I mean among ordinary employees; their CEO is perhaps a different story.) They've turned into a large, professional, bland organization, which causes many problems, but not the type of thing the OP (whose shoulder appears to me to have a chip on it) is alleging.
I'm not saying this as any fan of MS. As far as I'm concerned, they've brought all their problems on themselves with egregious past behavior. (Reminds me of what Martin Amis said to Salman Rushdie after the fatwa: "It could have happened to a nicer guy.") But that doesn't change the fact that the anti-MS crowd behaves far more childishly than MS does.
I think the real problem in this instance isn't that IE crashes. We've all seen, used, and in most cases, written buggy code. Large systems are hard to get right, we all know that.
The problem is how hard it is to report such problems and get taken seriously. I, for one, have spent hours trying to tell someone that their code/system/service is severely broken, and yet repeatedly get ignored. I often don't know if this is because they already know, or whether they don't care. The problem is trying to report it, and getting ignored.
Here's a crazy idea. Have an on-line bug reporting service that includes a CAPTCHA, but the CAPTCHA requires that you write a small piece of code, or solve a problem, or something techie. Very, very few reports of problems will come in via such a portal, but at least you know they can be taken reasonably seriously.
Which is of course a terrible idea when you're trying to report a problem that has or could have security relevance. I'm definitely not going to pay for support just so I can report security bugs to Microsoft.
It would seem the next step up from all those upgrade IE6 banners is just to crash the entire browser. If enough sites did it then using IE6 would become untenable.
It seems a bit drastic to crash people's software intentionally but you could argue that you're doing them a favor.
