General

In most installations of EPiServer the environment for editors and administrators is working without any problems. However, in some cases problems may appear that in worst case scenarios results in Internet Explorer (IE) freezing. This FAQ has been created to gather information about known problems and their status. It also suggests actions that might correct the problems.

Recommendations

To create a smooth environment for editors and administrators in EPiServer we recommend the following:

• Use Internet Explorer 6.0 or later.
• Use the new dhtml-editor instead of the old Active-X editor (This applies to EPiServer 4 customers with version 4.20 or later).

Known problems

These are the problems that we know about today:

• Navigation in the page tree makes IE freeze. This occurs rather frequently in IE 5.5 and we have recreated this behavior. However, this problem does not appear in IE 6.0.
  
• Several problems with the ActiveX-editor. Internet Explorer sometimes freezes while loading or saving the content in the editor. Many of the problems seem to appear in MSHTML.dll which is a assembly outside EPiServer.
  
• The ActiveX-editor hangs when, in html view, creating an image tag that references a non-existing file and then switching to the design view. This only seems to happen in Swedish IE 6.0.
  
• The first time the ActiveX-editor is loaded it is not shown correctly. The next time you load a page the editor is shown as it should.
  
• Upgrading IE 5 to IE 6 will sometimes not work as intended. Some parts may still be old versions and the browser may behave strangely.

Suggested actions

Here we have collected several actions that might solve the problems mentioned above. We recommend using the environment suggested previously in this FAQ. If this is not an option for the customer the following suggestions might help with some of the problems.

•  Use IE 6.0 or later. Many of the problems that may appear in earlier versions of IE either completely disappear or appear more seldom.
  
• Upgrade your EPiServer to version 4.21 or later and use the new dhtml-editor. This may sometimes seem as a big step to take, especially for EPiServer 3 customers. However, this is the best single action that can be taken to avoid the problems that appears in IE when using the ActiveX-editor. *)
  
• Add the EPiServer site to trusted sites in IE settings. Some customers have solved some problems by doing so.
  
• Change from Swedish IE6 to English IE6. This might solve problems that only appear in the Swedish version of IE6.0. This is probably not needed when using the new dhtml-editor.
  
• Cleanup the html-code created by the editor. If certain pages freeze the browser it is possible the html-code contains data which the editor might have problems with during loading or saving. We have not been able to reproduce this behavior.

* Several hundred man hours has been spent to this day to develop the new dhtml-editor to avoid the problems with the old ActiveX-editor. We will not continue to develop the old ActiveX-editor unless new, reproducible bugs appear. The new dhtml-editor will not be available to use on an EPiServer 3 site unless the site is upgraded to a EPiServer4.

If the problem remains

If the problem still remains we recommend that you contact the EPiServer support for further assistance. Include version of EPiServer, browser version and a detailed description of the problem.