I spent an hour today trying to assist a fellow developer with debugging why Internet Explorer 6 suddenly started throwing the dreadfully hard to fix ‘Operation Aborted’ errors on page load. After stripping the page down one piece at a time, he was able to determine that having the following code in the head…

<base target=”_top”>

…while using gMapEz on the page was causing the error to be thrown. I immediately tried it on the Salem Clinic Locations page, and sure enough I saw the same behavior. Whether this is due to a change in the Google Maps API javascript, or an IE6 update, or the position of the moon is still unknown.

I hate developing for IE sometimes.

Update #1

I did some more googling on the issue. It doesn’t appear to be directly related to the gMapEz framework, but the Google Maps API. One blogger called the IE6 handling of the <base> tag ‘dodgy at best’ and directly noted that you should remove it to get Google Maps working in your page reliably.

Shaun Inman, the developer of a PHP stats package I really like, has noted the same behavior in general and has some other workarounds on his blog.