SiteMeter Should Fire Their Dev Team

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Sitemeter is a free and very popular webcounter script used by many webmasters to track visitors, hitcount, referrers and more. In fact, this blog post here was written just the other day from information gleaned from my own Sitemeter account.

But Sitemeter took out my blogs and everyone else’s Saturday night for anyone who uses IE 6 or 7. And they did this by breaking a basic law of software development: they rolled out a change in their infrastructure without bothering to perform any testing. If someone did that at PlxxxCo where I work, they would be fired.

From SANS here:

It appears that during a development update of SiteMeter, their team did not take into account a known bug in this version of the browser which does not allow modification of a parent container using scripts in one of its childs (using either the innerHTML or appendChild method). This causes the browser to stop loading the site, returning an “Operation aborted” message.

SiteMeter has now resolved the issue and published a blog entry explaining what happened.

Yeah, SiteMeter posted a blog, but I notice they refused to claim any responsibility for the massive Denial of Service they caused. I had to remove the SiteMeter code from my websites to get them to load again. I guess I can put the code back, but why should anyone trust a software company that obviously:

1. Codes badly.
2. Neglects to perform QA Testing.
3. Pretends that the problems weren’t their fault.

Its bad enough that their code has sometimes caused websites to load slowly. But when they begin to donk sites off the net completely, its time to abandon SiteMeter.