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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

IE7 Displays Blank Page: Firefox OK.

When I try to browse to my website, which contins an ASP page, I get a blank page for IE7, yet all is well for Firefox.

View Source in Firefox gives the normal page, while IE just shows this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; 
charset=windows-1252"></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>

The page had some Flash embedded, but I get this result even after removing it. Im heading for "Clearly, IE is BROKEN". What MORON would have a browser substitute a blank page without any kind of error or warning message?


I found the solution after pulling an all-nighter on it.

This had to do with a database error: here's what happened. For some reason the database error was NOT getting reported to the browser, it just got a blank page.

I store the data from every hit in a table for diagnosing problems. That data element was a varchar(250), which up until now was more than adequate. The string from a firefox hit comes in at 163 and looks like this:

03/10/2008 16:24:14 Mozilla Netscape 5.0 (Windows; en-US) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12 en-US Win32

However IE7 sends this for the exact same page:

03/10/2008 16:24:14 Mozilla Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.590; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.590; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022) undefined Win32

That's a whopping 380 characters, which caused a string length error on my SQL insert command.

I still don't understand why in hell it returned a completely blank page to IE without any errors listed but whatever, I'm re-doing the whole site in ASP.NET anyways.

The ANSWER: I had to stretch the database column where I'm storing the hit data strings to 1000 characters. That ought to hold me until IE8 SP2 at least.

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