Explorer breaks on Photoshop 7 jpg files

but only on Windows platforms

[tedster]

A friend turned me on to this not so minor bug. It explains lots of strange things I've been seeing on my own system lately.

When Photoshop 7 saves a jpeg image (not ImageReady/'Save for the Web' which works very well, but the native Photoshop 'Save') the resulting file has some embedded data, including a thumbnail and (XML?) instructions on how to use it. When these images appear on a web page, many versions of Explorer on various Windows platforms will hang indefinitely trying to load the image.

IE seems to be confounded by this embedded data, and that includes HTML email in Outlook, which can also hang up trying to render these jpg images.

Here's the worst part - after that point, the IE browser will no longer load images at all - and in my experience, not even external CSS files. It gets turned into an unstyled text browser and sometimes the only fix is a full reboot of the computer.

Here are some references:

FruHead [fruhead.com]
Photo.net [photo.net]

[edited by: tedster at 5:00 am (utc) on May 2, 2003]

[grahamstewart]

Yup, BlobFisk mentioned this in Graphics forum [webmasterworld.com] a couple of days ago.

The solution is to use the Save for Web feature - not the normal Save.

[tedster]

Yes, as web developers we can avoid the problem. But as web users, the experience of having Explorer just crap out like that is pretty awful. From what I read so far, it is Microsoft's problem, not Adobe's.

Sure hope they fix it soon.

[grahamstewart]

True, but any web developer worth their salt should have tried the page on IE/Windows (since that is by far the most popular browser) and discovered the problem long before it makes it online.

I doubt we'll see it causing many problems for 'normal' users.

[keyplyr]

I use IE exclusively and have never had this problem, and all my PS7 jpeg/jpg images are 'saved'.

[BlobFisk]

It certainly is an unusual one. I believe that it is only IE6 that the error occurs. What puzzles me is that JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format) has included support for additional text for quite some time, and that Adobe have been using this to include XML (RDF/XML I belive) for some time also.

Why an error is now showing (with such a new browser) is bizarre. I haven't seen much discussion about it, but as Graham says, if the error lies with Microsoft, what sort of major changes have they made that creates this problem?

[keyplyr]

...if the error lies with Microsoft, what sort of major changes have they made that creates this problem? - BlobFisk

I have the IE6 error reporting turned off, can't remember where/how I did it. But I no longer get that message that says whether to send an error report back to MS and I don't experience the jpg problem described above.