Viewing Fatal Error on Internet Explorer

Fatal Error on Internet Explorer



User: Liane O. 4 years ago
Hi,

I'm hoping for some help on something that's stumping me. I've updated our website to be responsive using standard Everweb tools and, since doing so, some of our users have reported getting a fatal error - maximum number of style sheets has been reached.

I've dug around and it seems to be an issue with older versions of Internet Explorer that have a limit of 31 style sheets; the thing is our webpages have nowhere near that amount. Verified using developer tools on all browsers and using Safari User Agent of IE 7 upwards.

Has anyone got any ideas what might be causing this error? Our customers are schools and tend to have their browsers imposed on them using local authority group policies so we can't just tell them to upgrade or use another.

We didn't have this problem before updating to responsive layout.

Thanks in advance.
User: Aristomenis X. 4 years ago
Hi Liane,

IE 9 and before does have some funny css rules.

You might want to check your <style> and <link> tags in your different pages as you can only have 31 total per page (combined).

Is this a problem that appears on the homepage / certain pages or in all of them?

A few other things that might give you css errors:

- selector numbers per document (max. 4095) - this would be surprising to attain but it's worth mentioning
- font-family names (max. 31 characters long) - In case you're using google or other exotic fonts, check the name length of each one

Other than that I could suspect caching issues. That is easily verifiable just refresh with F5 instead of ctrl + R on PCs. You can also add a few meta tags to force refresh on pages:

[code]<META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="0">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">[/code]

I would suggest if possible to erase what is currently on the server and reupload the whole website. It you're using everwebs servers you can republish the whole website.

Good luck with everything hope you find a solution soon.

Last edit 4 years ago
User: Liane O. 4 years ago
The error states maximum style sheets 31 has been reached. When checking using developer tools on all of our pages the max style sheets being loaded are 12 or 13. Nowhere near 31.

The update to responsive design did involve a whole site upload so that's already been done.
User: Paul-RAGESW 4 years ago
HI Liane,

Sorry for the problems you are experiencing.

Can you please share your website URL that has the issue so I can take a look?

-------------------------------
Paul
EverWeb Developer
User: Liane O. 4 years ago
Hi Paul,

Sorry for the delay. Our customer's weren't specific but I think www.icompute-uk.com or www.icompute-uk.com/purchase-1.html

Thanks,

Liane.
User: Liane O. 4 years ago
Further to this, I used Firefox developer to inspect the number of stylesheets and rules used.

It appears that since converting our web content to responsive elements in Everweb the style sheet count has increased drastically which causes problems for IE 9 and lower.

For example on www.icompute-uk.com each element inside a flexbox has its own stylesheet created by Everweb - E.g. each text box inside the flexbox has an individual stylesheet for (say text_box_38) and, if it has a text box button, another style sheet for that.

This means that that this webpage is using over sixty stylesheets and many more rules!

Can Everweb advise as to how we can use Everweb responsively and efficiently using the current tools?
User: Paul-RAGESW 4 years ago
Hi Liane,

Since you are using third party HTML snippets for the membership site, there are many Style Sheets in your code. What you are describing in how EverWeb exports code is not really a problem and is normal.

What appears to be the biggest issue is that the Membership Script you are using is importing a lot of CSS files. Furthermore the consent script, timeline script, font awesome and Google Fonts are adding to the issue.

It does appear that the quantity of FlexBoxes and TextBoxes may be contributing as well, but not in the way you have described. I have marked this down for investigation for EverWeb 3.2. Basically, we may be able to combine the <style> tags into one style tag. However, this still may not fix the problem due to the number of third party scripts you have on your site that are importing and adding many CSS files and rules.

But please be aware that IE 9 is no longer supported by Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft doesn't support IE 10 either and recommends everyone use at least IE 11. They don't provide security updates for versions of IE before version 11.

IE 11 and all modern browsers have no issues with the number of style sheets you are using.

However, we will investigate this further and see if we can provide some optimizations for your website.

-------------------------------
Paul
EverWeb Developer
User: Liane O. 4 years ago
Thanks Paul,

We do use custom html for membership that involves CSS but I could only find a few on the page I was inspecting (our main landing page). There were 33(ish) Everweb related stylesheets. Thank you for marking it down for investigation. I'll remove unnecessary stylesheets elsewhere but the 33 Everweb will still take us over the 31 stylesheet limit for IE.

I note your comments on IE and would really love to advise our customers to use something else but they often cannot as they have their services served on group policies. Therefore they perceive our website to be crashing with fatal errors; which doesn't inspire them with confidence for our company which provides online services.

Thanks again for your support.
User: Liane O. 4 years ago
Just updating on this as I'd hoped Everweb 3.1.7 may have gone some way to helping with this problem:
"2. Significant improvements to Responsive websites on older browsers"

Firefox Developer shows there are 34 Everweb stylesheets for our responsive pages which does throw an error on IE 11 (not just earlier versions).



I'm aware we have stylesheets for other scripts but Everweb makes up the bulk of them and pushes them over the 31 limit.
User: Roddy 4 years ago
From the Home page I can see that there are only 6 stylesheets used by EverWeb to create the basic site, All the rest are third party scripts.

Check out the names of these scripts in the Styles and Frames folders.

I'm not sure why you would need three styesheets just for Fontawesome?

I would suggest you pull a bunch of these external stylesheets, combine them and upload them to the website's server rather than having all these individual requests from different sources, These are slowing down you page load time and will effect the search engine ranking.

-------------------------------
Roddy

Website: http://everwebwidgets.com
Contact: http://everwebwidgets.com/ewWidgets-home/contact.html
NOTE: I am an EverWeb user and NOT affiliated with EverWeb! Any opinions expressed in this forum are my own.
User: Liane O. 4 years ago
Thanks Roddy,

When I use Firefox Developer Styles Sheet Editor and inspect the source code for our homepage I see the few stylesheets you mention but also many more inline stylesheets which are for Everweb Flexbox containers and text boxes. It appears that each time you add a flexbox or text box to a page Everweb creates a new inline style sheet. Since moving to responsive pages this means that the Everweb style sheets now exceeds 31 which triggers the Internet Explorer fatal error maximum style sheets reached error. We do use three third-party scripts on that page but the vast majority of style sheets used are Everwebs.

User: Roddy 4 years ago
The code inserted by EverWeb for the flexbox is regarded as internal styles - not a stylesheet;

In CSS3 there are three ways to insert styles - from an external stylesheet which is referenced via a link, internal styles which are inserted in <style></style> tags in the head code and inline styles which are entered in the HTML.

I'm not sure why you would want to support Internet Explorer since it is very outdated, not supported and is a security risk for anyone using it.

-------------------------------
Roddy

Website: http://everwebwidgets.com
Contact: http://everwebwidgets.com/ewWidgets-home/contact.html
NOTE: I am an EverWeb user and NOT affiliated with EverWeb! Any opinions expressed in this forum are my own.
User: Liane O. 4 years ago
All style tags after the first 31 style tags are not applied.

Any stylesheet or style tag is counted as a style by Internet Explorer and after counting the first 31 of <link rel="stylesheet" /> and <stylex/style> on a webpage the error is triggered. Our homepage has 40 style tags, most of which are Everwebs and therefore any of our users that visit the website using Internet Explorer are seeing the error:

'Fatal Error. You have reached the browser stylesheet limit'

I know IE is rubbish and I'd love to get them to change browsers but our (paying) users are primary schools (and hundreds of pupils) most of whom have their systems and support supplied by Local Authority's or external IT providers. Their browsers are often set by group policies and they cannot change the browser for teachers and pupils themselves.

Our users are also not technically savvy so they see that error and think our website has crashed. As we're an online service for schools this doesn't inspire confidence when potential customers visit our site and think it's got problems.


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