IE7, removeChild and SSL

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

We recently launched some items into an environment and an JS bug appeared when deleting a DIV. The bug is slightly difficult to debug in that all versions of IE are especially “blind” when it comes to error handling. Here’s the criteria:

  • page is being requested in mode
  • div has a background image in the form url(/path/to/image.extension)
  • the use of the removeChild function

 
Any time the specific div gets removeChild’d AND it contains a background css style, IE will prompt the user the page contains non-secure elements right before it gets removed.

To get around this, delete the background css style before calling the removeChild function. has also released two alternate fixes.