System error: -1072896658 in IE

Problem:
Recently my team reported a problem while integrating one of the Ajax features I developed. Whenever they try to access that feature, it throws up an error "System error: -1072896658". I was suprised because that is working fine when I access in my test environment. Later after debugging in the integration environment, I found out that the problem is with charset. While configuring the server environment, they mistakenly specified the charset as "UTF8" (instead of utf-8) and that is the culprit of this error. So, whenever the response is received in the browser and accessed using xhr.responseText, MSXMl.dll (MSXML component) is not able to interpret the response and throwing a system error.

Solution:
By changing the charset to "utf-8", it started working absolutely fine.

Conclusion:
Make sure to specify the correct charset.

Closing Tab/Window in Mozilla using window.close

Category: workaround

Mozilla browsers will not allow you to close the window using window.close() unless the script opened the window. This is a little annoying sometimes. But there is a workaround to resolve this issue. If you observe the error message that is thrown by Mozilla Firefox, "Scripts may not close windows that were not opened by the script", it clearly says that if the script didn't open the window, you can't close that. But we open a blank page in the same window using "_self" as the target window and close the same window. In that way, the script opens the window (which is a blank one) and closes the window too.

So, to put this in the code,

< script >
function closeMe()
{
var win = window.open("","_self"); /* url = "" or "about:blank"; target="_self" */
win.close();
}
< /script >
< input type="button" name="CloseMe" value="Close Me" onclick="closeMe()" />

In mozilla, if there are more than one tabs open, then only the tab where this script is being executed, will be closed, not the whole window. But if there is only one tab open where this script is executing then the window will be closed.

Tested this script in Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.4 and IE 6, XP SP2, Mozilla 1.7.12. I didn't test in any other browser.