Flash and IE6 bug when loading XML

Last week I stumbled upon a really odd Flash Player bug. I’d done a project for a client that loaded XML. It worked great on the clients test-server, but when moved to the deployment server we got a weird error - in Internet Explorer 6, the XML refused to load, returning an IOError?

When I debugged I found that the Flash Player was indeed loading the XML but it apparently failed to parse it? After some Googling I found this article at MediaCatalyst that claimed that this had to do with the headers sent from the servers? Didn’t really sound probable, but it was worth a shot. It worked…? Wow. Somebody should fix this bug, shouldn’t they?

So - if you’re having problems loading XML with only IE6, make sure you check that the server does not send the HTTP response header: Cache-Control: no-cache You can easily check this using a tool like Charles.

Luckily, IE6 is less and less popular and with some luck, web designers can stop worring about it in a year or two.