One of our readers Rick recently emailed us asking us another interesting question:

Whenever I do a "google search", I get a screen that says " Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage". I key in "ebay" and this is the message. How do I fix this? The I'm feeling lucky button seems to work but not the google search.

The site aborted operation error occurs because of the page rendering engine in Internet explorer. If any webpage tries to modify the content before the entire page is loaded you may see a site aborted operation error.

This error can be attributed to any website you are trying to load has poorly written webpages that use JavaScript to modify the content before everything between the body tags has been loaded or to a add-on that tries to do that same. The official Internet Explorer blog has a good article on this called “What happened to Operation Aborted ^[1]”. The good news is that IE8 which is in the making is more lenient towards developers simply raising a JavaScript error like other browsers do. In Rick’s case we suspect the “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” error being to one of the add-ons he is using. You can try to load Internet Explorer without any add-ons and then try to perform the same action, if everything goes fine you will have to enable each add-on one by one to find the faulty add-in that is causing the issue.

To load Internet Explorer in no add-ons mode, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Internet Explorer (No Add-ons).

Microsoft has a length Knowledge base article discussing this issue. You can visit the knowledge base article You receive an error message in Internet Explorer 7: "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage ^[2] to get more information about this issue. Hope this helps solve your issue Rick, if our readers have any problem feel free to ask us ^[3], we will try our best to find a solution for it.