Website renders on IE7 w/ Windows 7 but freezes on IE7 w/ Windows XP

Question

I already can't stand working with IE7 but now I ran into an issue that is driving me nuts:

• internet explorer 7 (IE 9 running IE 7 mode) works fine on the site and behaves as intended
• internet explorer 7 on Windows XP does not work properly
  • site takes several attempts to load, once loaded you cannot navigate to internal pages of the site
  • if you click a link, it loads the title of the page but the content never renders at all (old page is still there) and the status says "Done". no error messages or anything

I've never ran into this issue before and I have no idea how to debug this. Any help would be appreciated.

edit: the cause of the issue is selectivizer with font-face, this will crash the browser.

Answer 1

Alright, I had to dig really deep to figure this one out.

The main issue is using IE7.js - IE9.js or Selectivizr.js with font-face, these do not work well with IE7 (works fine with IE9 in compat. mode) this will lock up the browser completely.

The work around I found was to first remove font face delcarations from my CSS and move it to a seperate CSS file. Then run Webfont Loader (http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.html) AFTER Selectivizr. Now everything works fine.