Here’s what I spent about half an hour today figuring out. I blame this completely on one Michael Benny.

So in IE there’s an option on if you want to allow JavaScript to execute in the “Local Computer” zone. You can set it to allow or disallow. There’s also another preference, on if you want to allow JavaScript at all (similar to FireFox’s javascript.enabled. Or so you would think).

These two settings conflict with each other in completely different ways in IE6 and IE7.

IE6: If you enable allowing JavaScript to run in the “My Computer” zone, but disable JavaScript, it will still run JavaScript in the “My Computer” zone anyway. I could see how this happens, though I dislike it, and think it is wrong.

IE7: If you enable allowing JavaScript to run in the “My Computre” zone, but disable JavaScript, it won’t run JavaScript on the “My Computer” zone. Hey, one step forward, right? However, it will not process any noscript tags because it thinks JavaScript is enabled. So, neither the JavaScript NOR the noscript will execute.

AWESOME!

I need to get out of QA before I do a few thousand dollars worth of damage to Google hardware. Or Microsoft buildings.