Microsoft software has a bit of a reputation for growing ever larger and more complicated and yet also managing to work less well in the process.  In many respects this is quite unfair (the latest incarnations of ISA server and Services for Unix aside) but IE8 does seem to be a case in point.

Accessing what should be simple management interfaces of simple devices like switches just doesn’t work with IE8, typically producing missing graphics, script errors, and occasionally even an IE hang or restart.  ‘Compatibility view’ doesn’t seem to help either.  It almost seems that Microsoft has something against network components – a clean install of Windows 7 is of limited use for managing basic network hardware since IE8 doesn’t work and the OS doesn’t come with HyperTerminal any more (and even if it did, most likely the laptop vendor has long dispensed with a serial port anyway).

Fortunately, the problem turns out to be pretty simple.

Concurrent Connections

Whilst working on the NginX article, I noticed that the ‘usual’ allowance for four concurrent browser connections would produce similar results on pages published through NginX.

Herein lies the crux of the issue – with IE8, the default number of concurrent connections has been increased to six, which simple devices just can’t handle. 

Resetting this to (say) two brings everything back to life.  Making this change unfortunately needs regedit, but Cisco have produced a decent article detailing the fix here, and I’ve added them to my own wiki here.