Internet Explorer crashes when a phone number is displayed on a page

In Windows Tags #internet-explorer Published 2/15/2012

Issue:

IE crashes whenever a page with a phone number, or a number with the same number of digits is displayed.

  1. First thing to try, run IE in safe mode (you can find it through your start menu, it’s called “Internet Explorer (No Add-ons). Navigate to the page that crashed your browser before and see if it crashes. If it does not, the problem is very likely related to a plugin that is being loaded.
  2. Identify plugins that might be rewriting the HTML before it gets rendered. This could be any number of plugins, but in my experience Skype has always seemed to be an offending plugin. In my case, disabling the Skype plugin stopped this behavior. Something it was doing re-writing phone numbers was crashing the browser (it rewrites them on the page when it seems a phone number pattern so that you can click on them and shell out to Skype).
  3. If #2 doesn’t fix the problem, you’ll want to re-enable the plugins one by one to find the offending one.

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