IE 11, Page can’t be displayed, Google.com, & SPDY/3 Protocol
Posted by William Diaz on October 28, 2013
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.
Windows Explored 
Mikeg said
Following an upgrade to windows 8.1 I was experiencing this exact issue and unchecking use SPDY/3 resolved it.
many thanks
Paulby said
Thank you soooo much for publishing this solution! I thought it was my Google Search string or the Proxy we use.
Steph Alves said
Hi,
This doesn’t works for me. I add the address google.com on compability view settings and now it’s works perfectly.
Rgrds
Steph
Page Cannot Be Displayed on Google sites using IE11 said
[…] https://windowsexplored.com/2013/10/28/ie-11-page-cant-be-displayed-google-com-spdy3-protocol/ […]
Google not loading first time in IE11 via a web proxy on Windows 8.1? Turn off SPDY support. | The Angry Technician said
[…] it as happening with Websense, and once I knew what to look for I’ve also found the same problem reported with Microsoft’s Threat Management Gateway, so it’s not definitely not limited to […]
danieljloughlin said
We had the same problem with IE 11 behind both TMG and Squid
Darren Gibbard said
I’d recommend contributing to https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/813993/ie11-sites-that-support-spdy-do-not-load-first-time-when-ie-is-configured-to-use-a-proxy-server-and-spdy-is-enabled
Applying pressure for a fix is probably the best way to go! 🙂
System Administrator said
I’ve had a similar issue that only occurs when a machine has upgraded to ie11 on windows 7 from ie8 . The resolution is to add the following setting for each user.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
“WarnOnZoneCrossing”=dword:00000000
This then allows a connection to googl.com
William Diaz said
we already have that disabled via policy. The issue seems specific to systems behind a TMG proxy.
dustin1985 said
My debugger doesn’t look anything like yours but I’m having a similar problem. How do I get in to see the Frame Details?
William Diaz said
This is network monitor 3.4. Its part of the default view, otherwise View menu > Frames. Btw, Message Analyze is the successor to Network Monitor.