Adobe Reader's browser plugin in Internet Explorer(all versions) displays the following message while rendering some Pdf's "A network error occurred while accessing this document on the Internet. Would you like to close the document or reload it?"
This message occurs only in the IE. I am using Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard OS, IIS 7.5 server to start Tomcat 7.0.29 as Web-App Service, IE 9 and Adobe reader XI. Issue exists when using Tomcat 6,IE other versions and Adobe Reader 9.
I browsed online about this error and found all related interesting reasons given, the emails in this long thread talk about about whether it is a Tomcat Issue or not.
Other links like http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979543/en-us, http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/handling-byte-range-requests-iis.html will suggest something really close about the issue and say to do the Hotfix. I tried the Hotfix and got a message "This update is not applicable to the computer".
I used Fiddler2 and found that, when Adobe-Plugin request the IIS server with a multiple byte-ranges in the Request Header, the corresponding response from IIS will not have the same length of bytes requested.
For example if Request Header has "Range: bytes=1638400-1646079, 1650688-1652223" the response has the headers "Content-Type: multipart/byteranges;boundary=CATALINA_MIME_BOUNDARY","Content-Length: 9458","Accept-Ranges: bytes". Notice that the Content length of the response is 242 bytes more than the requested. Same happens when Request-"Range: bytes=1589248-1605631, 1605632-1622015" Response-"Content-Length: 33010" >> 242 bytes more.
I clearly know that the message occurs as soon as this request and response session happen. Please tell me if anyone has observed the same with request and response, why will this occur and how to fix it, or work around it ? Is the problem with AdobeXI plugin or IIS7.5 or Tomcat ?
I'm not sure exactly what causes this timeout error, but here is the solution we are using. Instruct users to follow these steps:
In Adobe, go to the Edit menu and select Preferences. Under 'Internet', make sure the box for 'Display PDF in browser' is unchecked. Click OK to save your changes.
In IE, go to the Tools menu and click on 'Manage Add-ons'. Then, click on Adobe Reader and click the Disable button. I think this should disable the built-in Reader in IE, so PDFs will have to open in Reader instead of in the browser.
This causes all pdf document downloads to open outside of the Internet Explorer browser in the standalone Adobe Reader application. The issue doesn't occur when opened in this way.