Recently I came upon a need to test printable versions for a calendar app. After quite a bit of css things were looking really nice and shiny in Firefox. An hour of tweaking later, I was looking good in FF and IE7. When I gave it a try in IE6… no dice. “Print Preview” showed me a blank page. I couldn’t imagine what the heck I had in there to cause it, so I tried just printing it – IE6 basically flipped me off and just gave me a js error… ok, something was wrong. A quick try at printing the Google frontpage came up with the same results, assuaging my fear that I had written a magically blank page in the eyes of IE6 but sending me on the hunt for a fix.

I found a bit about exposing a bug to get printing going. That trick is that bookmarking also doesn’t work… in a good way (for us).

1. Visit the page you want to print
2. Bookmark it
3. Visit the bookmark
4. The print dialog magically pops up and you can print the page.

That works fine for Google’s frontpage but not so well for my page which is hidden behind authentication and other goodies.  After some hacking around for a good solution, I ended settling on the low tech route.

1. Visit the page in Firefox
2. Do a “Save Page As” and set the format to “Web Page, complete” – this’ll save a static version of the current html (and friends) locally for you
3. Load that locally stored file in IE.
4. Bookmark
5. Visit the bookmark
6. Viola

Not the smoothest possible process, but if you’ve only got a few protected pages to test… it may be better than installing and uninstalling various versions.

That didn’t seem right.  It seemed like the browser would have something to do with efficiency but surely the primary bottlenecks (for something so dramatic) would be network related, but I was running the uploads off of the local network and wasn’t seeing the same type of issues in any other browser/OS.

With a bit more digging, the culprit was found.

This issue occurs because the default Winsock Send buffer is 8 kilobytes (KB), and therefore Internet Explorer supplies the data in 8 KB chunks. On an average network, this equals approximately 80 KB per second (KBps), regardless of network bandwidth.

So, you might not bump into this if you’re running on a not-so-fast connection, but if your users are typically going to be on something nice and quick – there’s a fix here (via some registry changes).  Of course, the real fix is: update IE to the most recent version or just use Firefox.