Why doesn't my intranet site work in Internet Explorer 8 for XP when addressing with FQDN?

Question

I am having a really weird problem. We have an intranet site/application that uses jquery and jqplot.

When trying to access pages on the site with every browser we've tested it works fine, except for Internet Explorer 8 for XP. Win 7 works fine with both IE8 and IE9. Here comes the weird part: when we access the site (in IE8 XP) with FQDN (dnsname.ourdomain.net) it doesn't work. When using DN (dnsname) only, computername or computername.ourdomain.net it works fine.

By not working I mean that the page does not load in full. Some objects fail to load while others load as expected. It's almost like the browser refuses to load some parts on the page due to some lookup error or something.

Maybe someone with knowledge of how XP/IE8 handles dns/caching/credentials or other fundamental issues of browser/os ... can shed some light on this subject.

A little more info:

When we try to access the pages linked from a root document which is an aspx-file it doesn't work. When trying dnsname.ourdomain.net, this points to a default.aspx. When clicking links in that document we get empty pages. If we restart the browser (IE8 on XP) and go directly to the full path: dnsname.ourdomain.net/path/to/file/Default.aspx it loads as expected. But only after restarting the browser.

Even more info (may 19):

I've pinpointed this even more down to that it is when using POST on wcf-webservices to retrive data from the webserver it doesn't work. Searched many threads regarding that paticular problem but so far nothing seems to resolve the problem. When running on XP/IE8 I get 400, bad request. When I try to debug with Fiddler i mysteriously work since (I think) it sets up some proxy to trap requests. Maybe this is becoming a question more fitting in Server Fault.

Answer 1

Have you checked if IE8 is using compatibility mode on XP (under the page menu) vs. Win7?

Also check what security zone IE8 has put the site in on the WinXP and Win7 PCs.

If there are no clues there, IE8 has a reasonable set of developer tools. Press F12 on the page you are testing to bring them up. From there you can check (and change) the browser mode and document mode IE8 is using by clicking on the options in the menu bar at the top of the developer tools window.

You might also want to test to see if jquery has loaded. To do this, bring up the console (script tab in developer window) and enter:

console.log($.fn.jquery);

You should get something like:

LOG: 1.5.1

where 1.5.1 is the version of jquery you have loaded.

You can test if JQPlot has loaded with:

if($.jqplot) {console.log("JQPlot loaded")} else {console.log("JQPlot not loaded")};

Answer 2

Problem now solved!

After much searching we ended up in the dns server and how the records where set up. The dns record for the server was set up as a pointer (PTR) to the same server which resulted in mismatch in the reverse lookup. When we set the dns record to be an ALIAS to the same server it works. We have to blame it on the dns-people here...

It must be something (wrong!) in the implementation of IE on XP that causes this behavior since we haven't seen any problems on any other OS/Browser combination.