Internet Explorer 8 doesn't finish downloading the page!

Question

I'm currently finishing up testing a new Ruby on Rails app. Just recently, some of the pages do not seem to finish downloading in IE8. In FireFox, Chrome and Safari, everything works perfectly. The pages all validate successfully using the W3C validator.

When I view the page source in IE8, the page has been chopped off around 75% of the size it should be. IE8 claims the page is finished loading, and doesn't give any errors, but of course the page isn't rendering properly.

Has anyone seen this before? I'd really appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Have you tried to watch the http requests, using something like Http Analyzer or HttpWatch (like firebug for IE)? That might shed some light if there is a problem with a JS or CSS file not being found, or if the server is returning something other than a 200.

HttpWatch has a free version at http://www.httpwatch.com/download

Answer 2

IE8 Comes with a built in developer toolbar. Just press F12.
You should be able to diagnose most problems using it.
Also, open the page in Firefox with the Webdeveloper Toolbar addon and check if any javascript issues are arising. I find that sometimes you may only see the error in IE8 but you might only figure out what is wrong using Firefox. Give it a try!

Answer 3

There was a javascript call in the page that needed to be wrapped with:

document.observe("dom:loaded", function() { ... };

in order to work in IE. Apparently, it was disruptive enough to kill the entire page render. Thanks BenTheDesigner!

Answer 4

Since this is the first result on a Google search for IE8 not completing a page request, I thought I'd add on that I've seen the same symptoms caused by Sophos Anti Virus' Browser Helper Object which interferes with page requests and thus doesn't complete download requests every time.

Hitting F5 resolves the issue most of the time but a click to the next page can cause it to reappear. Other symptoms include odd page rendering of background images, incorrect repeating or no repeating being done at all despite a CSS declaration specifically telling a background to repeat. I spent a week debugging my CSS and XHTML only to eventually try disabling all the browser "Add-ons" and all of a sudden the issue went away.

I nailed it down to Sophos' BHO and now no rendering issues.