window.open() woes

Today while working with some javascript I discovered just how different Internet Explorer and Mozilla really are.

I had this very simple piece of code:

window.open('test.html', "Test Window");

For some reason it didn't want to open up in Internet Explorer. On Mozilla it worked perfectly but IE just simply raised an invalid argument error.

I solved the problem by removing the space in the WindowName parameter.

window.open('test.html', "TestWindow");

After looking at Mozilla's DOM:window.open developer documentation I saw this:

strWindowName

This is the string that just names the new window. Such string can be used to be the target of links and forms when the target attribute of an element or of a is specified. This string parameter should not contain any blank space. strWindowName does not specify the title of the new window.

Now I must assume that Mozilla test for this space and if it is found simply ignores it.

Open Source versus Proprietary