IE8 Trusted sites not displaying PDFs in a popup window with Adobe Reader 9

First, some background on the development environment:

• Windows Server 2008 - 64 bit
• Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18943 (using the 32 bit exe)
• The website is running under SSL
• The site has been added to the Trusted sites security zone with Protected Mode off
• The functionality works fine in Firefox and Chrome.
• Adobe Reader 9.3.4
• Internet Explorer add-on: Adobe PDF Link Helper 9.3.3.177

Steps to reproduce:

• Login to the SSL site
• Click on the javascript link that opens a new window with the URL to return the PDF.
• The popup window opens (in my case as a tab) and is marked as being in the trusted sites zone.
• The page appears to be completely blank with no content or HTML loaded.

Solutions

It appears the issue could be related to IE8 opening the new tab in a separate process and not correctly passing the session cookies in with the new request. See Stack Overflow IE8 losing session cookies in pop-up windows.

Happened again

This definitely appears to be related to the site being in the trusted zone. In another similar case a pop up window would spawn in a new window without the session cookies when triggered from a trusted zone. When the site was taken out of the trusted zone the pop up would open in a new tab with the session cookies.

Trusted Zones and iframes

Update 23/01/2012 - Encountered another variant of this issue when the website trying to open the popup window was in the trusted security zone and an iframe of a parent site. The parent website that contained the iframe wasn't in the trusted website zone and IE was showing mixed zone security messages. When the popup window appeared it was in the trusted zone but had lost the session cookies.

IE8 security warning when mixing http and https content

Ran into an issue with IE8 showing the following prompt with every page view under SSL.

Security Warning
Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?
This webpage contains content that will not be delivered using a secure HTTPS
connection, which could compromise the security of the entire webpage.

Turns out the addition of the Microsoft AJAX CDN service is the cause in this particular case. Changing the script link to use SSL resolves the issue.

Help getting IE6 off the web

IE6 has been with us for some time now and for a good part of that time it's been a real pain to develop for. It was made in simpler (more naive?) times before good CSS support was a sensible requirement for a web browser.

The problem most web developers now face is how to encourage everyone to upgrade to a more standards compliant browser.

Vincent Hasselgård posted some code to encourage IE6 users to upgrade their browsers. See Give IE6 users the message to upgrade or change

Will putting this code on developer focused sites help? Probably not. I'd be surprised to find a developer using IE6 by choice. Still, any step I can take in removing IE6 from the web is a step in the right direction.