Browser continues 'loading' after ajax request finishes.

Question

You've seen this - on an ajax-heavy page, like meebo.com, the browser never stops 'spinning', it never indicates that it's finished loading. What causes this, and is there any way to consistently tell the browser (whatever browser it may be), that loading has completed?

EDIT: Sorry, I should've specified that I'm a developer here. I've noticed this on other sites, and now one of mine as well that's using ajax. I want to make sure that when an ajax call comes back, the page stops 'loading'.

Answer 1

If you with javascript uses document.open() to write stuff to your page, the spinner will spin until you actually invoke document.close().

Answer 2

No solution for the AJAX call per se, but I did find a solution for uploads to iframes, which is the pseudoAJAX technique for uploads. If you remove the iframe from the DOM and then put it back, the browser will stop the upload. Neat little trick.

Answer 3

This is also a well-known bug on IE when attaching behaviors dynamically to a page or requesting a lot of objects.

Microsoft KB Article - behaviors

Microsoft KB Article - requests

Answer 4

I answered this question in another question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1064782/stop-the-browser-throbber-of-doom-while-loading-comet-server-push-iframe/

There are browser-specific techniques to make the spinning stop, or not to begin spinning at all and still load data with a server-push.