As a programmer I can tell you that I don't think they even expected to run into an issue like this so they couldn't have advised us of the nonsensical requirement of IE. Had they seen it, they would have simply fixed it and then there would be no need for an explanation.
All they did is put the whole code inside a generic, top level, catch-all error handling block. (try-catch)
There is no specific error message, just a generic error code which is probably a hash of the crashing filename + source line.
They likely tested it with IE only. So they never saw this error. And nobody from the Microsoft developer team saw this bug report or if they did they didn't pay it any real attention.
This was not intentional. You can't program for every case. Bloated design requirements suck. They didn't want to write up sixty pages of documentation for a simple print button.