I have a website that uses a long-polling comet connection. The connection needs to be setup on/after page load.
Despite my efforts to prevent it, many browsers consider the long-poll request to be part of the page loading mechanism, thus keeping the page in a 'loading' phase. In Safari this results in the progress bar (behind the url field) to not complete. In Chrome the favicon is shown as a spinning loading icon. Even more problematic is mobile safari on iphone, that does not allow hiding the url field while 'loading'. Mobile android has similar issues on some devices.
All in all, the behavior is difficult to reproduce and seems to be dependent on browser/platform/connection speed/etc. Right now, my code initiates the long polling 10msecs after the window.onLoad trigger. This seems to work well often, but not always. I suspect it may have something to do with loading some external (image/javascript) resources, yet one would say the onLoad event is fired after these are completely loaded.
Anyone some pointers on how to force these browsers into considering my page as loaded? Ideally, one could somehow mark an xmlhttprequest as comet-like, but this is no feature :).