JScript sucks!

I have been working for 2 days for IE specific bug. And I could not even reproduce it on my usual environment such as IE8 or IE9 on Windows 7 or Windows XP. The platform I could only see it was Windows Server 2003 with IE 8.

Until now, I still couldn't figure out how I can solve it and couldn't find any article about this bug either. So let me memorise what happened and what was different between working environment and incorrect environment.

Before starting explanation, let me describe the background environment. We are using Wicket on the server and some process requires AjaxRequestTarget which is created Wicket's internal request cycle depending on the browsers request of course. And the problem was somehow browser did not request with AJAX but usual GET request in this case just click the link.

The problem seemed javascript did not work properly on 'A' tag's 'onclick attribute. It did not report any error but just processed 'href' value instead of 'onclick' javascript. First I thought this is IE8 specific bug if 'A' tag has both 'href' and 'onclick' then it process both and 'href' will be the latter so that browser send non AJAX request to server and die.

As I already mentioned the usual client environments work very fine, but on Windows Server 2003. So I made the test environment and tried to debug with IE8's ugly javascript debugger. First I added following code to 'onclick' attribute; 'alert(this)'. Then it suddenly raised error said 'JScript runtime error: Object required'. And from there if I delete the line it also raised error unless I refresh the page. So it seemed 'this' object was incorrect. However it is just 'A' tag itself how could it be wrong? (NOTE: we are using JQuery and in onclick $('') function was called.)

Now, at least I have one hint, alert message I added to the attribute. It said 'javascript:void(0)' means the same value as 'href' had. I'm not JScript expert but as far as I know usual IE showed 'Object' or something not 'href's value. This looked really weird to me. So I check the JScript engine's version both working and non working environment. Yes, the version was not the same. On working environment which is using IE 9 had version 5.8.16982 however non working environment had 5.8.23141! I have no idea if this is specific version for Windows Servers but smelled crappy as hell.

So I copied jscript.dll from server to XP on VM and see what happened. Unfortunately it wasn't the case. Not the version different of JScript engine but platform dependency? I'm stuck. So we concluded don't use Windows Server as a client.

If you know what is wrong and how we can solve it, PLEASE let me know.