IE Randomly Doesn't Display Images

Question

When I load my site up in IE (I'm using 8 but I've seen this happen on 7 and 6 too) every now any then it will show the "red x" for some images. I know those images exist so I refresh the page. When it renders again those images that had a "red x" are now displaying properly, but other images, even ones that were displaying properly in the last render, now have a "red x".

I usually need to refresh a handful of times before it renders the entire page properly.

I don't know what causes this or how to repeat it.

I did take a look at the network traffic in Firefox and noticed most of the images were coming back 403 Not Modified.

Has anyone else experienced this? Do you know any way of fixing it?

Answer 1

Use Fiddler to debug the HTTP traffic, and look for the requests in your webserver logs.

Not modified is 304 (not 403). If you are getting 304, that means that it thinks your cached version is fine.

If you are getting 403, then you don't have permission to the file. It should never have loaded. Look to see if you are getting 403, then a re-request with authorization headers.

Answer 2

I would bust out an HTTP Debugger like Fiddler or Charles (for the Mac) and make sure the problem is IE and not something else (like IIS dropping/mis-handling requests, etc.).

Answer 3

I have the same issues. Was happening with dynamic images that I creating with javascript Dom object. So I worked around that. An now normal everyday image tags are not showing in IE7. Works perfectly in firefox. I can sit their an refresh and watch as sometime the images are there and sometimes they are not. This is a flat html file with javascritp running directly from the file on my machine. Makes not sense. There is not server or no traffic issues. It's running off my machine. I'm guessing its an IE bug. I hate IE.