Occasional blank page on IE6 during a site visit

Even though the market share of IE6 is on the way of shrinking around the world, the truth is many organization still deploy this particular version of web browser for LAN users. I always have a doubt on the statistics provided by IE6 Countdown website.

Anyway, I noticed some of the client computers are still running IE6 SP2 which is a bit better in security but still not flawless. IE6 is supposed to handle well in HTTP/1.1 connections and it always sends out HTTP/1.1 request. If not sure, have a look on the following URL and checkout the appropriate option to force IE6 to send HTTP/1.1 request:

http://www.ehow.com/how_6516962_fix-internet-explorer-provided-dell.html

Okay, even the client side is ready to handle HTTP/1.1, the proxy server or even the web server at the far side may not send back HTTP/1.1 response. In case of Apache 2.x server, the default settings make it suppress HTTP/1.1 response but send back HTTP/1.0 response instead, particularly for Internet Explorer.

You may find the settings under httpd-ssl.conf as follows:

#
BrowserMatch ".*MSIE.*" \
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

According to EricLaw's opinion, this actually force Apache server to give out HTTP/1.0 response to any version of IE, even if IE sends out HTTP/1.1 request at the client side. This could lead to intermittent blank pages on IE6 which is actually error-prone to this kind of responses from the web server.


Some people suggest they simply comment out the settings to avoid this problem. Somehow, IE6 is not perfect enough if we don't put nokeepalive and ssl-unclean-shutdown directives into the filter. Other problems may still arise of IE6 or above version.

To overcome most of the problems among those different version of IE, we have put in detailed criteria to selectively tackle the problem of particular browser version.

The recommended settings would be like these:

#
#IE Version 2 to 5 should be downgraded to HTTP/1.0 for compatibility
#IE Version 1.0 not even support HTTP/1.1 so ignored
BrowserMatch ".*MSIE [2-5]\..*" \
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
#
#Prudent settings for newer version of IE
BrowserMatch ".*MSIE [6-9]\..*" \
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown

Please beware of backward-slash plus double dots "\.." in the expression.

Except for some performance degrade on IEs, this should keep those browsers running fairly okay at the client side. In the far future, we might have to think about how to handle the case of IE10, IE11 or IE12 in case they are released. Hope those problems will be gone in the newer release of IE.

After all, Firefox, Safari and Chrome do not show any symptom like this in IE. So, finger crossed;)