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>

6 Comments

  • If this works I'm gonna lay a big wet slobery kiss on you and Carlo. Cheers!

  • Hey E Hart,

    Hmmm...I'm not sure whether I hope this solves your problem!

    Ken

  • I had the same problem on my client, the IE6 hangs, but didn't solve the problem with the enableCompression="false", in my machine with IE7 works fine... any ideas?

  • We had the exact same problem, although we are doing a Ruby on Rails installation totally unrelated to ASP. We discovered that a "Virgin" IE, as you say, would hang for about 5 minutes per chunk of content that we were loading. Although we had disabled gzip compression in Apache for IE6, we found the problem still occurred intermittently. We are using Akamai in front of our servers and it turned out that even with Akamai set to never serve gzipped content, if the origin server sent the content gzipped, that is how Akamai would serve it. Therefore if a user were to hit our server using Firefox, they would receive compressed scripts, and then subsequent users using IE6 would also receive those compressed scripts. The solution was to turn off gzip compression for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

  • But, won't this mean that no scripts will be compressed? Is there a way to conditionally set this just for delivering scripts to IE 6?

    Scott

  • I just pasted this into my applications web.config hoping it might fix ajax / ie hanging

    I must be missing something since vs 2005 complains it an invalid code segment.

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