Why do my PHP sites lock users browsers

[IPAlarms]

I have been tasked with repairing a Customers two web sites that keeps locking visitor browsers. I am a pure HTML or ASP.Net developer and the sites are currently in PHP which I know nothing about.

The offending sites are at www.ukaffordablegranite.com and www.agandm.co.uk if anyone can spare the time to test if either of them lock their browser. They do not affect all browsers or all versions of each browser, so if you do get chance to visit and reply to this post, please let me know the browser and version number.

Any PHP savvy guys that could View Source and give me clue as to which section of the page could be causing the problem?

Thanks in advance

Edit: Found out the sites only crash Explorer. Just FTP'd the sites down to our local drives for further testing.

 

[MOH]

Main page loaded fine, but when I went to e.g. Granite worktops > Cut on Site it hung in IE8, but not Firefox.

Does Firefox render the page earlier than IE. The status bar still reads 'Downloading content' after the page has loaded.
Maybe IE is trying to complete the download before rendering?
Or more likely, is there an IE specific script running?

Ran it through webpagetest.org but can't see anything obvious.

 

[IPAlarms]

Thanks for your time - much appreciated.

We are actually still downloading the files from the server via FTP (1 hour & half into it) so have not had chance to examine the code yet. Never worked with PHP, so not sure what to expect. Will report back once I've had a look at the code. We will need to strip out whatever is causing IE to hang.

 

[php.allstar]

Hi,

I don't think its a php issue.

Try removing that monoslideshow thing (and associated javascripts) and reupload, clear your browser cache and let me know what happens.

Also I know you didnt code it but the source code is a mess. There's way too much javascript libraries loaded in, prototype, scriptaculous and jQuery and at that, it looks like they messed up by calling scriptaculous twice (lines 18 and 43).

On line 18 they're looking for scriptaculous at http://www.ukaffordablegranite.com/imagesi/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects - the "imagesi" directory is non-existent.

What I'd do is strip out all scriptaculous and prototype, stick with jQuery and use that to handle any slideshows etc..Surely one library can handle whats needed.

Good luck with it, nothing I hate more than having to clean up after someone else's code!

 

[IPAlarms]

Hey,

Thanks for the comments. I'm hoping that rather than "clean up" we may be able to start from scratch using HTML only, but not knowing anything about how PHP works under the hood, I would appreciate your guidance on whether or not by replacing the existing index.pl with a pure HTML index.html we would screw up the whole site ?

I don't know whether PHP compiles files from the site into a .dll or something. All we want to do at this stage is replace the index page so that we can get started with a redesign and some basic on page SEO.

 

[php.allstar]

Hi,

I'd view the homepage in a browser, and copy the source, save it as index.html in the root folder and that would be that if you want to take that approach.

Be careful however that there may be some broswer specific code and include files, but hey, why not dive in and give it a go. Just make a backup of the original is the proverbial hits the fan.

PHP is a scripting language unlike .net which is a comiled one. PHP scripts can be a mix of html and php code or pure php. Once you create or edit a file it the php code is processed on the server and served. No need to complile dlls or anything of that nature.

I'm not big on SEO but you may want to tell the Search enigines that index.pl is will now be index.html