views:

1469

answers:

5

I've come across a really strange problem where a page I'm trying to test in IE7 and IE8 is taking forever to load. The problem is that it works in all other browsers just fine (yes... even IE6). The page just keeps loading saying:

'(1 item remaining) Waiting for http://...'

Does anyone know of any reason this could be happening?

A: 

Last time I saw that behavior, it was IE7 trying to load a page with an EMBED tag that had no SRC attribute (I don't remember if it was defined as "" or if it simply wasn't defined at all in the markup).

lance
A: 

Quick & Dirty workaround if you just want it to 'work' in IE 8, you can add this to meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

This forces IE8 to render the page like IE7. Alternatively you could add an HTTP header to IIS that will do the same thing.

PortageMonkey
That's not going to help, particularly if he sees the same problem in IE7.
EricLaw -MSFT-
+1  A: 

Try watching the page download with Fiddler (www.fiddler2.com). Are there any outstanding HTTP requsts when you see that message?

EricLaw -MSFT-
I'm having the same problem. Fiddler didn't show any outstanding HTTP requests.
Eric the Red
A: 

The most interesting link I can find on this:

https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=337678

FSDev

A: 

I had a similar problem with a webpage today. There seem to be other people having this issue but nothing pointing to a single cause or a single solution for everyone's problems. Like Eric the Red, Fiddler2 didn't show any outstanding HTTP requests. I even looked at the server logs and didn't see anything odd there. So I dived into my HTML code and first validated my HTML. There were a couple of HTML errors in the templates used on the page that caused non-valid XHTML to be output. Fixing those seems to have fixed the problem. I say "seems to" because previously it didn't happen every time and even though I haven't see it happen since I fixed the HTML code, I'm not convinced that I have tried it enough to be certain (or that there isn't something unrelated to changing the HTML code that has fixed it). Valid HTML code may or may not be the issue for your case. Seeing the source as JoshJordan asked for could be helpful. I'd suggest taking out chunks of HTML until you don't have the problem any more and trying to pin-point which HTML code is the offending bit.

Ok, valid HTML wasn't enough to solve my problem. I ended up removing code and testing repeatedly in order to find what was causing this (it only showed up about 1 in 3 or 4 tries so persistence was necessary). It appears to be an IE bug. For me the offending line of code was trying to remove an <input> tag of type="image" using either elem.parentElement.removeChild(elem) or mootools dispose(). Changing that line to just set elem.style.display="none" caused the problem to disappear.I'm not sure if that's your issue as well - your mileage may vary.