Over at Peeve Farm, an explanation has been found for Internet Explorer's odd mix of tremendous speed on some sites combined with oddly sluggish performance elsewhere.
To sum up for non-techies: IE assumes it's talking to IIS (a Microsoft web server program) when you type in the address of a web site and sends out a non-standard request for the web page you've asked for which will either work more quickly (if sent to an IIS-based server) or make no sense at all to anyone else's web server software. If the server doesn't play ball, IE sends out a normal request for a web page and everything starts working again.
Why would they do this? Quoth Peeve Farm's Brian Tiemann:
[...] in the grand scheme of things, this probably makes sense to Microsoft's network engineers. After all, eventually all clients will be Windows platforms running IE, and all servers will be Windows platforms running IIS. And then we can break all kinds of rules! Rules are only there to hold us back and force us to play nice with other vendors. Well, once the other vendors are all gone, who cares about some stupid RFC?"Embrace and extend" is such a lousy idea on so many levels... Posted by John at January 03, 2003 09:37 PM