In my last post I discussed using the ActiveX(”htmlfile”) technique to provide a usable streaming transport in Internet Explorer. The solution I provided will work, but since writing the last article I’ve made significant progress in understanding why IE behaves the way it does with respect to the streaming transport.The previous solution amounted to creating an array of messages, pushing messages on that array from the htmlfile iframe, and popping messages off of the array in the parent window, and processing them. Here is the function we use to create that solution:functio...

In early 2006, Alex Russell posted about a neat hack that the Google Talk team in Gmail use to support Comet in Internet Explorer, a trick which works as far back as IE 5.01. What great news! A reliable way to stream Comet messages to Microsoft’s browsers. If only it were that easy.I have not been alone in the following findings: after connecting the htmlfile ActiveX object as a streaming Comet transport to my Comet server, everything works perfectly for a few messages, but then abruptly fails. The connection is closed by the browser with the server-side error “Connection reset by...