I’ve been taking Internet Explorer 11 for a test drive recently and started to notice an odd occurrence. Upon initially opening IE 11 and typing www.google.com into the address bar, I am unable to get to the page, instead getting the generic : “This page can’t be displayed…”

A quick refresh, however, had no problems taking me to the page afterwards. Closing IE (and making sure all iexplore.exe processes are closed via the Task Manager) and typing the same URL again would reproduce the problem roughly 8 out of 10 times. A quick look with Network Monitor should that connection was, in fact, successful:

Looking at one of the frames in the network capture showed the presence of an additional HTTP protocol I wasn’t familiar with in Internet Explorer, SPDY/3:

I remember seeing it in the Advanced tab of the Internet Explorer settings:

Unchecking this setting resolved the issue. I am not sure why this is happening. SPDY/3 is a relatively new open protocol introduced by Google and being adapted by IE. More about it can be read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY & http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol/spdy-protocol-draft3. In short, it makes the browser speedier by reducing web page load times.

Update

Seems to be reproducible only behind a proxy, TMG in our case.