Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Taking Advantage of an Internet Explorer Bad Behavior
I just noticed a fun side-effect of the fact that Internet Explorer un-coolly keeps TCP connections open after making an HTTP request. This is a nightmare for server administrators because it increases the load on web servers compared with getting a lot of requsts from non-IE browsers.
But my last post contains a remote image, which links to an interview with James Wolcott on a page that contains the picture I assholishly hotlinked. But because there is an open TCP connection to that server from loading the image, clicking on it will bring up the page much faster than normally, since the connection has already been made. Just a funny observation, I still don't think IE should do this.
Comments:
Hi!
First, let me say that I am no friend of IE. And IE refuses to play nicely with Blogger.com. I am now using the new FireFox browser with Blogger though I still have to use IE to get the Java packages at Yahoo! to work properly.
Now... What you are talking about, maintained connections, is not part of just IE but an integral part of HTTP 1.1. Most commercial webpages have hundreds of bits and pieces that would require hundreds of connections to be established and broken for each page if the connection wasn't maintained.
I also wonder if the reason the image comes up so quickly isn't because it is cached in your browser.
Leo
First, let me say that I am no friend of IE. And IE refuses to play nicely with Blogger.com. I am now using the new FireFox browser with Blogger though I still have to use IE to get the Java packages at Yahoo! to work properly.
Now... What you are talking about, maintained connections, is not part of just IE but an integral part of HTTP 1.1. Most commercial webpages have hundreds of bits and pieces that would require hundreds of connections to be established and broken for each page if the connection wasn't maintained.
I also wonder if the reason the image comes up so quickly isn't because it is cached in your browser.
Leo
It wasn't cached because I normally use FireFox as well, and just brought the post up in IE later, not having viewed the linked page in IE. It came up _very_ quickly, much more quickly than it will load in FireFox, or in a freshly-loaded IE.
There was a slashdot article on this, and that it was an IE-specific behavior, but I searching hasn't produced it yet. :P
There was a slashdot article on this, and that it was an IE-specific behavior, but I searching hasn't produced it yet. :P
I read an article a long time ago about IE basically cheating and leaving the connection open after making a HTTP request. This is NOT part of any standard, as I stated above, it's basically cheating. It causes some major headaches for non IIS web servers. As a side note, this provides absolutely no benefit if the server you're talking to isn't IIS as they will basically tell IE, "what?" and force IE to do the transaction properly. Again, it's been a while since I read the article so I'm just working off the top of my head; I could be not entirely accurate. Of course, when MS had over 90% of the browser market they could do crap like that.
I guess I can't complain since I can't even use IE in Slackware. It would actually be convenient for testing purposes since I'm a web designer but I guess I'm better off without it.
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