Page doesn't fully load in IE7 or IE8 (but wor

Question

I've come across a really strange problem where a page I'm trying to test in IE7 and IE8 is taking forever to load. The problem is that it works in all other browsers just fine (yes... even IE6). The page just keeps loading saying:

'(1 item remaining) Waiting for http://...'

Does anyone know of any reason this could be happening?

Answer 1

I've hacked around this problem shamelessly before. This used to happen in FF and IE for me. I would send an XHR, or a request for an image in the window.onload event to fool the browser into recognizing there were no pending requests.

Answer 2

Try watching the page download with Fiddler (www.fiddler2.com). Are there any outstanding HTTP requsts when you see that message?

Answer 3

I had a similar problem with a webpage today. There seem to be other people having this issue but nothing pointing to a single cause or a single solution for everyone's problems. Like Eric the Red, Fiddler2 didn't show any outstanding HTTP requests. I even looked at the server logs and didn't see anything odd there. So I dived into my HTML code and first validated my HTML. There were a couple of HTML errors in the templates used on the page that caused non-valid XHTML to be output. Fixing those seems to have fixed the problem. I say "seems to" because previously it didn't happen every time and even though I haven't see it happen since I fixed the HTML code, I'm not convinced that I have tried it enough to be certain (or that there isn't something unrelated to changing the HTML code that has fixed it). Valid HTML code may or may not be the issue for your case. Seeing the source as JoshJordan asked for could be helpful. I'd suggest taking out chunks of HTML until you don't have the problem any more and trying to pin-point which HTML code is the offending bit.

Answer 4

The most interesting link I can find on this:

https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=337678

FSDev

Answer 5

Quick & Dirty workaround if you just want it to 'work' in IE 8, you can add this to meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

This forces IE8 to render the page like IE7. Alternatively you could add an HTTP header to IIS that will do the same thing.

Answer 6

Last time I saw that behavior, it was IE7 trying to load a page with an EMBED tag that had no SRC attribute (I don't remember if it was defined as "" or if it simply wasn't defined at all in the markup).