I tell ya why I'm hatin.

Without getting too in detail with what I do, and why I do it, one of my applications at work has to serve documents out over the web. And there are more than a few potential documents. Enough so that storing them as files is just not happening.

So we store them in a database. Simple. And a custom page just sets a content type and streams them to your browser. Your browser, as best as it can, figures out what application should display the content based on the type we tell it.

It works. It works really well on Netscape/Mozilla, and Opera. And it worked OK on IE. But it seemed to load the stuff twice on IE for some reason. Checking the weblogs confirmed this.

So I did some digging, and referenced a few articles in the MSDN knowledge base, which I'm far too lazy to link to here. But the short of it is, IE grabs your content, looks at the type, figures out what application to load, then loads the content again for the application.

Can anyone spot the problem there?

But it actually gets worse. If you're using IE 4, you're loading the content 3 times.

And it does this by design. It's not a bug, according to microsoft. Actually, it probably *is* a bug, but they're not about to admit it as such.

So next time you're using IE on a dialup, and wondering why ESPN.com takes so long to load, just remember that all that shockwave and flash is being loaded at least 2, possibly 3, times over. Because your browser is crap.