IE6 Hanging after Clearing the Cache: Remove AJAX Script Compression Too
One of my client's customers was really upset because Internet Explorer 6 would often hang on opening the client's ASP.NET Web application. Naturally it struck during an important "show and tell" session.
We were able to reproduce the problem by deleting all of the temporary files, history, cookies and web form info in IE 6 and then browsing to the page. (This became known as the "Virgin IE Loading" bug!)
IE 6 has a bad reputation for choking on compressed content and I suspected that a regression error had crept back in during an update. Our first attempt was to disable gzip compression in IIS 6. No luck. IE 6 still hung. Then, I saw a post about AJAX compression issues.
Although the post makes it sound like ASP.NET AJAX uses compression only for IE 7, we decided to disable script compression using this setting in the web.config:
<system.web.extensions>
<scripting>
<scriptResourceHandler enableCompression="false" enableCaching="true"/>
</scripting>
</system.web.extensions>
That was it! Fixed!
I'm not one who supports Microsoft "owning" every machine on the planet when it comes to forced Windows Updates but I'm willing to make an exception if there's a way to get IE 7 pushed out to this client sooner than later. Some corporations move at such a snail's pace. <grin>