IE11 intermittently not loading pages

Question

Many of our users are reporting that they are getting a blank page when using IE11 to access our website. Sometimes they don't even get a blank page, the browser just stays on the last page visited. These users can access other domains (such as google.com) without a problem.

For the browsers that are failing, if those users disable Protected Mode in IE, then they can again access our site, but this isn't a good solution because we have thousands of users and we can't go telling each of them to reconfigure their browsers, not to mention that we're completely losing the business of those potential customers who just surf by, see a blank page, and then keep on going without filing an error report.

Firefox and Chrome work fine. Also, even when using IE11 in protected mode, some users have zero problem, their computers just seem to work.

We are running the site off of IIS7. Other sites on the same server run fine, it's just the one particular site that is having the problem, and it's intermittent, affecting some computers and not others.

There must be something I can do on my side in the server or network settings to keep this problem from happening, but I'm baffled as to what it might be. When I look at the network traffic on a browser that's failing, the GET request is just being aborted with no explanation. When looking at the traffic with Wireshark, I see no errors, and no errors are showing up in the IIS logs. Of the browsers that fail, they are not even opening a connection to our web server to make a GET request, the request is just aborting immediately.

Any advice appreciated!

(followup): Another test we did: We can reproduce the problem on our development server, with the same pattern of which computers "work" and which don't. We tried turning off the webserver, and the problem stayed consistent, we'd still get a blank page error. So it's obviously not to do with anything that's in our page content? I've run tests on 9 computers on our office network: 5 worked, 4 failed. We're all baffled. :/

(January 24 followup): We figured out what's causing the problem, but not how to fix yet. Deep in the Windows registry, a key is being set in a Zonemap folder, adding a "play.net" domain with a key value of 2. IE sees that key when someone types play.net, and quivers and dies without an error message (Firefox and Chrome handle it fine).

So next question, what is setting that key in the first place? Probably an ActiveX control somewhere, but we haven't had any luck finding it in this 15 year old site, as many of the coders who may have created ActiveX controls in the past are long gone.

Does anyone know of a way to scan an entire domain and list anything that might be twiddling a registry key?

Coadjutrix

Aaaah... good ol' internet explorer – Trichite

I've maybe one solution... block your website for IE users! It's a blessing in disguise :D ! – Incoercible

What is the site? Do you use any plugins? – Haemocyte

The site is www.play.net (and I'm actually wondering if the ".net" suffix might be part of the problem, since other .com sites on the same server work fine). I don't think Plugins have anything to do with it, it's occurring to multiple browsers and there doesn't seem to be any pattern with plugins. – Coadjutrix

Answer 1

Followup mail threads from Elonka indicated that some users had the play.net domain mapped to a specific / non-default Internet Explorer security zone, and those users were the ones having problems.

Finegan

Answer 2

Try add

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=10" /> 

into the header. It fixed IE11 for my website. It just forces it into IE10 mode (A complete joke though)

Rubella

Answer 3

I accessed your domain in Internet Explorer 11, with Protected Mode enabled. I was unable to get a fully broken experience, but I did see something perhaps related to what your customers are experiencing. Some directories on your domain would hang for me, resulting in a white screen if they've not yet been loaded, or staying on the present page while the forthcoming page is loaded.

When I navigated to /dr, I found that my browser hung for over 7 seconds while your files loaded. Note, there were roughly 60 items, totaling about .78mb. This isn't much, but I'm presently on a relatively slow connection, and this resulted in a hang for me.

I would inquire what connection speeds your clients are on when experiencing this issue - it could very well be nothing more than some directories being served up more slowly than others. Regardless, you could optimize the experience considerably by compressing and concatenating your CSS files, as well as all of your JavaScript files. This results in fewer parallel requests, and quicker downloads.

If you have a reproducible example, please feel free to share and I'm sure myself and many others here will be more than happy to assist you.

Wildee

Hi, thanks for the reply. I'm certain it's not related to the page content, because we created a simple HTML page with nothing special on it, and we're still getting blank page errors (example: play.net/notforsale.html). It's also not network-related, because we'll see differing results on computers on the same network. For example, at my office, we've got two computers a few feet away from each other, both running Windows 7, both using IE11, both on the office network. On one, we'll get the blank page error. On the other, things work fine, even in protected mode. – Coadjutrix

One other thing worth noting, is that those computers that are "broken" stay broken 95% of the time. And then even if they suddenly start working, it will only be for a few page loads and then they "break" again. and those computers that are "working" stay working, they don't suddenly flip to a broken state. – Coadjutrix

One other test we did: We can reproduce the problem on our development server, with the same pattern of which computers "work" and which don't. We tried turning off the webserver, and the problem stayed consistent, we'd still get a blank page error. – Coadjutrix

Answer 4

For me box-shadow on an element caused this behavior. I removed the box-shadow(but left -webkit-box-shadow and -moz-box-shadow) and the problem disappeared. The interesting thing is that I still have box-shadow on another element...

Horten

Answer 5

If you are using 'offline.js' in your project, and you have version less than 0.7.19, then IE11 latest security update will see this code as potential security threat and block pages which are using 'offline.js' code. Solution: Update to latest 'offline.js' version.

Falco