Every since I installed Windows 8 and IE 10 in December of 2012, I have noticed that IE seems to time out fairly quickly and returns a "This page cannot be displayed" message. This appears to happen after about 10 seconds if a website does not render in that amount of time.
We have a website with a considerable amount of content and during busy periods it is not uncommon for a page to require a little more time to render. When I go to pages in FireFox or Chrome, the loading indicator keeps spinning indicating that the page is still downloading and often times the download completes as desired.
However, in IE 10 when the "This page cannot be displayed" message appears so soon, it gives customers the impression that our website is down or not functional.
I would prefer that IE 10 show a progress indicator for more than 10 seconds before deciding that the page is not available and if the download time is longer then let the customer decide when they want to abort the download. I think that as long as the progress indicator is running, most people are willing to wait a little longer than 10 seconds for a page to render.
Having IE 10 make the decision that 10 seconds is too long is very frustrating because it leads to customers getting the impression that our website is not working when in fact it is.
We are not able to control customers choice of browsers and IE is still the leading browser people use when visiting our website. However, IE 9 under Windows 7 is still the primary browser accessing our website and IE 9 does not appear to have this"cut off" feature set to 10 seconds.
Gary Frickey
