$('<p>

</p>') fails (and freezes my Firefox 2.0.0.1).

This happens when the html string contains ' '.

The problems is caused by the html extraction line in function jQuery.

var m = /^[^<]*(<(.|
)+>)[^>]*$/.exec(a);

which fails with ' '.

/^[^<]*(<(.|s)+>)[^>]*$/ works for me.