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Ha, weirdly enough I was thinking about this recently! I worked with big Pharma in 2010s (so: old versions of IE, weird intranet-related security policies) and

Ha, weirdly enough I was thinking about this recently! I worked with big Pharma in 2010s (so: old versions of IE, weird intranet-related security policies) and this issue took several days of my life. I was building a realtime video player in this new cool thing called HTML5 at the time. HTML5 video support was (/still is, to some extent) a huge PITA due to the uneven codec support, minor implementation differences etc... So naturally I spent days troubleshooting that... Turns out `_` in domain names were not handled properly by some versions of IE running on intranet. The only more annoying bug like this I can remember now is fighting a suspected DOS attack on our servers when I worked in publishing. The culprit: our Android dev contractor decided to save some time by not implementing push notifications used to read the content but instead used the alarm service, thus making sure that almost every Android user fired a bunch of expensive requests at the same effin' time. Happy times.

Etheryte 2y ago
Reminds me of a similar IE issue, I can't recall whether you were capped to 2 or 4 parallel requests max while on the intranet and using a VPN (or some similar nonsense, the memory escapes me), but those were not fun performance issues to debug.
- DougN7 2y ago
  If memory serves, that was actually a limit in the WinInet library that most/many HTTP clients were built on.
wannacboatmovie 2y ago
> domain names were not handled properly by some versions of IE running on intranet Your choice of words implies there was a bug in IE, but there likely was not. People quickly forget before Google dumbed down the landscape with its Unibrowser and forced its ways and whims upon the world (and continue to do so)... IE had user-accessible settings for EVERYTHING. IE also had the concept of security zones with different settings for each zone including Intranet, a feature ahead of its time - quirkily enough and nearly undocumented, Chrome on Windows quietly uses IE's security zones for a few purposes of its own. Indeed, there are separate settings in IE for "Send IDN host names for [non] Intranet URLs" with different default values depending on Intranet or not, and the _ was likely interpreted as an international domain name and triggering this setting. Why does this setting exist? Knowing Microsoft almost surely for some backwards compatibility edge case.

Etheryte 2y ago

Reminds me of a similar IE issue, I can't recall whether you were capped to 2 or 4 parallel requests max while on the intranet and using a VPN (or some similar nonsense, the memory escapes me), but those were not fun performance issues to debug.

DougN7 2y ago
If memory serves, that was actually a limit in the WinInet library that most/many HTTP clients were built on.

wannacboatmovie 2y ago

> domain names were not handled properly by some versions of IE running on intranet Your choice of words implies there was a bug in IE, but there likely was not. People quickly forget before Google dumbed down the landscape with its Unibrowser and forced its ways and whims upon the world (and continue to do so)... IE had user-accessible settings for EVERYTHING. IE also had the concept of security zones with different settings for each zone including Intranet, a feature ahead of its time - quirkily enough and nearly undocumented, Chrome on Windows quietly uses IE's security zones for a few purposes of its own. Indeed, there are separate settings in IE for "Send IDN host names for [non] Intranet URLs" with different default values depending on Intranet or not, and the _ was likely interpreted as an international domain name and triggering this setting. Why does this setting exist? Knowing Microsoft almost surely for some backwards compatibility edge case.