IE 6&7 Hanging When Opening New Window

Question

I've got a real interesting situation. I have an existing web app that runs on a number of desktops fine. On a few desktops I see the following behavior:

• Upon clicking a link that opens up a new window (to another URL in the same domain) the IE window freezes and IE needs to be killed.

• This happens on IE 6 & 7.

• When using Fiddler I see NO traffic when clicking the link.

• When using IE HttpAnalyzer I see a request register but no response.

• If I change the MaxConnectionsPerServer registry setting to a higher value, e.g. 10 the problem goes away.

• Looking at netstat I dont see any abnormal connections.

So I'm totally confused, the issue seems to be on the client side and seems to be related to IE not being able to make an additional socket connection to the server, but netstat doesn't show that.

Ideas?

Answer 1

Hi : this is a tricky question, please provide more code, especially your link part.

The following code is xhtml transitional compliant :

<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">open Google in a new window(tab)</a>

I have been using this all the time, and never encountered with a freezing IE6 or 7 before.

Let me know if this doesn't work :)

Edited : Seems you are having different versions of IE and Firefox on clients desktops... I would guess the conflict dwells in the environment rather than within such a little piece of code...

Answer 2

Does the new window actually "HANG" or does it just fail to make any progress?

MaxConnectionsPerProxy fixing this means that you've got something that is "leaking" connections and thus you're hitting the connection limit.

There will be a blog post on this topic on the IEInternals blog shortly, but for now, you should look to see that if you have a pattern where the user frequently closes popup windows, that when they do so, you manually abort any in-flight XMLHTTPRequests or requests from Flash objects.