IE: COM reers its ugly head

Most web developers have heard by now about the quirky implementation of Internet Explorer that separates JavaScript into two camps: JScript and COM. JScript represents the code you write as well as the basic ECMAScript data types and structures. While other browsers also use ECMAScript to represent DOM, Internet Explorer does not. Instead, IE uses the old-fashioned COM object system to implement it, which results in things like memory leaks because JScript uses mark-and-sweep garbage collection while COM uses reference counting…and the two just don’t mix well in IE. Everything in IE’s DOM is a COM object, which is confusing to JScript in several ways.

When a COM object is accessed by JScript, it knows only that the object is an object, it knows nothing about its type or capabilities. As an example, the arguments object is a JScript object and is array-like in that it has numeric indices and a length property. Knowing that, you can quickly create an actual Array by using the Array‘s slice() method and applying it to arguments like this:

var values =, 0);

This is a fairly well-known and quick method of creating an array from an arguments object (I don’t claim to have invented it). It makes sense. You’re calling slice() in the context of an array-like object, so it behaves appropriately. It seems like that should work for any array-like object, perhaps like the HTMLCollection returned from getElementsByTagName()? Try this out:

var images = document.getElementsByTagName("img");
var values =, 0);

This works fine in all browsers…except IE. In IE you get an error message saying, “JScript object expected.” At least IE is being honest. The problem is that the HTMLCollection object is a COM object, and JScript doesn’t know anything about it other than it’s an object. JScript has no idea that the object is array-like; the object is a mystery. So, it throws an error because it doesn’t know what to do or how to handle the object that was passed in.

Another place where this issue occurs is in the DOM functions. Consider document.getElementById(), arguably the most often-used method in DOM. Now take a look at this code:

if (typeof document.getElementById == "function"){
    return document.getElementById(id);
} else {

This code works as expected in all browsers…except IE. Since document.getElementById() is part of the DOM, it’s represented by a COM object, which means typeof actually returns “object” instead of “function”. The document.getElementById() is not a JScript function at all. You can prove this in any number of ways:

//should be true
alert(document.getElementById instanceof Function);

//should be "function"

//should be "function"
alert(typeof document.getElementById.propertyIsEnumerable);

This doesn’t just go for document.getElementById(), but also for any other DOM methods. They are all COM objects and so can’t be treated correctly by JScript. This is a major headache and one that I hope will be addressed in future versions of IE.

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