Question

In reference to this question:

Chrome doesn't seem to fire javascript xmlhttprequests after a form submit, but FF and IE do

I need a way to update the page after I hit submit waiting for the server to respond (the response can take 10s of minutes) with information from the server (as in percent complete)

In IE and Firefox I can make xhr requests while waiting for the page to load. In Chrome this doesn’t work, chrome won’t fire the xhr request. I never get the hit on the webserver.

How does everybody else do this?

Answer 1

Don’t ever make your user sit around for 10s of minutes for a single page submission. They’ll hate you, your server will hate you, and all kinds of problems can ensue. Instead:

1. Submit the request, and place it in a queue.
2. Return a response to the user indicating that the request is queued.
3. Update the user as the queue is processed. Either in real-time using a comet solution, or just poll it every 2-3 minutes if it’s not time-sensitive.