Windows Explored

I probably spent too much time trying to figure this one out, especially considering I have used the IE Developer Tools (F12) to troubleshoot IE issues in the past, and the fix would have been amazingly fast if I had employed this resource at first. The problem was that a user was unable to view patent images from a website. In the past, this site had used different file formats to send the pages to the browser, such as TIFF. However, regardless of the TIFF viewer application installed, the pages would not render in the browser. Instead there was a red x displayed indicating the image could not be loaded.

After about half an hour of troubleshooting, I went to F12, selected the Script tab in the Developer tools to see what the javascript wanted to do and saw my answer near the bottom of the script:

The webpage was not trying to deliver a TIFF file. Instead, it was wanted to send a PDF. The fix? Change the PDF application (Adobe in this case) to display PDFs in the browser. I also should have avoided listening to the user insisting that the problem was with TIFFs.