I implemented CSS3PIE succesfully on the website http://www.alik.nl. I am using only box-shadow and border radius on 2 elements.
However, I get consistent IE6 crashes when refreshing a page of this site. IE7 and IE8 are ok.

I have done extensive testing to determine the cause, but there seems to be no one single cause.
I found that ingredients that all must be present to crash IE6 on page refresh are:

- an element with a border radius and PIE.htc behavior
- a CSS background image on the same element
- Google Analytics asynchronous tracking code in the head of the page
- A certain amount of html and css for the browser to work with. If I simplify the CSS or html of the page, the crashes are gone too.
Another thing I noticed is that if I put less html on the page, it takes longer (more refreshes) to crash IE6.

All of these must be present to get IE6 to crash on page refresh.
If I delete any of these elements, the crashes are gone.
I'm not sure what is going on here. Looking at these ingredients I suspect some kind of page loading/caching issue.

Because turning off Google analytics is not an option, the workaround in this case was to turn off the border radius on the footer element only for IE6.

I made a static version of the page for testing purposes, with the border radius on the footer element on:

http://www.remcokalf.nl/pie/test.html

I am testing on a fresh Windows XP/IE6 install.

I am running into this same problem. The only difference is I am not using an image in the background, on a color, and there is no Google Analytics code. Outside of that, I get will get random crashes as I go through the site. Only on an XP install of IE6 does this happen. If i emulate it on any other OS, a later version of Windows or otherwise, this does not happen.

I tested this again today, on another computer, on a freshly installed IE6 on windows XP SP3. Same thing happens.

I tried a workaround by setting the background with -pie-background. But the same crashes happen.
Disabling the border-radius for IE6 is my only option at the moment.

Hmm... I tried your test page in my IE6 XPsp3 VM and was unable to get any crashes after refreshing a couple dozen times. Is it still happening for you? If so can you think of anything else special about your setup?

Yes, It seems to only happen on machines running a native install of XP. If you use a VM version of it, you do not run into this issue. I have tried to reproduce this issue on a running a VM on OSX, and Win7 without an issue. Of course the issue is, if someone is using IE6 as their main browser, then they are pretty much running XP.

I also am running a native IE6 SP3, not a parallels or VM version.

I cannot think of anything special in my pages. I tried creating a minimalist test page, but it still happens if mentioned conditions are met. Most striking to me seems that the page needs a certain amount of html/content to crash. If I delete html to a minimalist version, I can only get it to crash after a lot of refreshes.

Another thing I noticed, but i am not completely sure of this, is that it only happens with SP3 installed. I also tested a little while installing Windows XP. When I had not applied the SP3 update yet, I could not get IE6 to crash. I did not test extensively because I wanted to move on with the updates, so I could be wrong on this.

Well that's worrisome. I do not have access to a native XP machine, so it's going to be pretty much impossible for me to fix this if I can't even reproduce it.

I guess this is where I reach out to the community and ask if anyone can help track down the cause?

Hi Jason,

Maybe you could do what I did: track down a secondhand PC for 80 euros, install Windows XP.
For your wonderful piece of software, which is going to be used a lot I guess, the more people are diving into CSS3, I think it is pretty crucial to have it tested on native installs of IE6, 7 and 8.

If I find some time I'll try test some more to find the exact cause of the problem by, but this kind of testing takes a lot of time.

Remco

I have/had a new - maybe related to above - issue in IE6:
In the same site as mentioned above, in IE6 the following suddenly happened:

When hovering over the element (the container div) on which I have box-shadow and border radius applied (with pie.htc), all background images of elements in this element (the header bg image, the navigation bg image and the footer bg image) are being reloaded. It happens continuously when hovering on and off the container element.
The behaviour is related to pie.htc, because when I took ik out, all was fine again.

I tried ruling out CSS errors and loaded the page without newly added javascript. All to no avail.

Then I reset IE6: emptied all caches etc and restored standard settings (not that I have any exotic settings).
After restart, the issues was gone.

This looks like another caching issue with pie.htc in IE6.