IE6 freezes due to *server* configuration

Question

Our web site (running Rails) freezes IE6 nearly every time. The same code, deployed on a different server, does not freeze IE6. Where and how should we start tracking this down?

Answer 1

Use Firefox with Firebug to compare the HTTP Headers in the Request and Response from both servers.

Answer 2

1. Might be a communication problem. Try wireshark against the server that freezes and the server that doesn't freeze. Compare the results to see if there is a difference.

2. Narrow down the problem. Start cutting out code until IE6 doesn't freeze. Then you might be able to figure out exactly what is causing the problem.

Answer 3

Try both in IE6 on different machines, preferably with as few addons as possible such as spyware blockers or Google Toolbars...

Answer 4

You can also try : http://projects.nikhilk.net/WebDevHelper/Default.aspx

That installs in IE and may help you in troubleshooting network issues and such. You may be able to see exactly when and where it freezes in the request/response by using its tracing features.

Answer 5

Is the freezing happening on your development server or your production server? Weather your developer server locks up IE6 or not isn't that big of a deal, but if your production server fails to kill IE6 you might have a problem!

:-P

Answer 6

You need to determine the difference between them, so I'd start out with the following:

curl -D first.headers -o first.body http://first.example.com
curl -D second.headers -o second.body http://second.example.com
diff -u first.headers second.headers
diff -u first.body second.body

Answer 7

I've been having this problem today on an AJAX-heavy site. I think I've narrowed the problem down to the server having GZIP compression turned on. When the GZIP was turned off on our server, IE6 loaded the page without freezing at all. When GZIP is turned on, IE6 freezes/crashes completely.

I also noticed that images were being served with GZIP from our server, so I disabled that for images and this solved the problem with IE6 freezing/crashing. Now the server uses GZIP only for .js, .html, and JSON.

Answer 8

Perhaps some more info that will help you.

We had the same problem and narrowed it also down to the GZIP compression. The key was that we had gzip compression on for our ScriptResources, which also deliver the javascripts used by the controls in our .NET page.

Apperently there is a bug in IE6 that causes is to freeze, we believe that the browser receives the files and parses them before unpacking them, which causes the freeze.

For now we have turned off the gzip compression, but as we have a large number of files provided through the ScriptsResource manager we need a different solution.

If I hear more I keep you posted.

Martijn