R – Why does the IE progress bar keep going after every other page load

asp.nethttp-compressioninternet explorerpostbackprogress-bar

I'm seeing this issue.

I have a relatively simple ASP.NET page with a gridview and some buttons. When I click a button, the page re-binds the grid and posts back.

What's strange is that every other time I click the refresh button, the IE progress bar (in the status area) stays "on", signaling that the user that the page is still loading…forever.

I've reproduced this on other pages–it seems to occur every time a post-back occurs.

Confirmed in IE7 and IE8, but doesn't happen in FF3.5.

Any ideas?

Update 1:

This appears to happen only when the server is configured for HTTP Compression.

In either case (compressed or not), fiddler shows just a single request which is served successfully. But, when compression is enabled, I get the problematic behavior.

Best Answer

I have seen this in the past with various setups, and never sorted it out. In one case I was able to use diagnostic logging on the server side to confirm that all http requests were complete. I found a technique that worked in order to make the progress bar go away though it really made me cringe: After a period of time (using setTimeout), write a 1x1 iframe to the bottom of the page, loading a blank html file. Of course, this was using IE5 or IE6 or something (it was ages ago), so that may not work any longer.

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