CF10 404 Catch Fails in IE

[coledrums]

I have CF10 running on IIS 7.5. CF is running a CMS application which uses a 404 error catch to serve up pages from CMS content by working out the CMS source from fictional URLs used.

The 404 handler is defined in the error page setup in IIS.

I am seeing very strange behaviour: when I visit a CMS-generated page (i.e. the URL does not exist, but there IS content to serve from the CMS), it displays fine in Chrome, Safari and Firefox, but in IE I get a "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" message.

Any clues?

Nick.

[BKBK]

When you say "it displays fine in Chrome, Safari and Firefox", do you mean by the 404 page displays fine in those browsers?

[coledrums]

Hi thanks for replying.

No, I mean that the CMS content is successfully displayed in those browsers, but IE returns the "cannot display web page" page.

In fact sometimes the non-IE browsers hang when trying to load the page.

You can see this at http://www.velox24.com/test

[BKBK]

I, too, failed to open the link in Internet Explorer version 9.0.8112. However, I did a quick test, and it tells me the problem is likely caused by the scripts running on the page.

The test went as follows. I opened your link in Firefox. I saved the page source locally on my machine as test.html.

When I attempted to open even this apparently harmless html file in Internet Explorer, the browser warned me that it has had to block content from the page. It said further, "Internet Explorer restricted this webpage from running scripts or ActiveX controls". 

You might therefore verify this by relaxing IE's script and ActiveX security. To do this, navigate in IE's menu to Tools => Internet Options => Security.

(WARNING: I am assuming you trust the scripts running on your site. I was too chicken to let IE unblock them)

Click on Custom Level. Modify the settings so as to relax script security. Now, try opening the URL with these new settings.

[coledrums]

Yes I do trust the site.

I tried what you suggested, but I don't think it made any difference. In no case did I get a message from IE about scripts or ActiveX controls. What it did reveal is that if you visit the page in IE and refresh a few times, sometimes the page DOES start to load, but then gets "stuck". In this case the behaviour is more like Chrome / Firefox - these browsers tend to load the page successfully first time, but then get similarly "stuck" if you try to refresh a few times.

As I say, a 100% cure for the symptom here is to create real files on the webserver which serve up the same content as the CMS 404 handler would have done, so the problem is definitely to do with the 404 handling. However, this is not a permanent solution, as it kind of defeats the object of the CMS!

Thanks again for your help.