MSIE11 Developer Tools not showing requests made by EMBED element

UPDATE: I assume the cause behind this weird behavor is that some plugins (WMP, VLC, ...) in some DOCTYPEs talk to the remote server directly, therefore browser simply can not detect their requests. I observed this behavior also in other browsers.

I'm adding EMBED element to a page using JS...

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
        <title>Captcha IE8 test</title>
        <script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.0.min.js"></script>

        <script>
            $(document).ready(function(event) {
                $('#target').click(function(event) {
                    var $embed = $('#embed');
                    if($embed.length > 0)
                        $embed.remove();
                    $embed = $('<embed id="embed" type="audio/wav" autoplay="true" hidden="true" src="test.wav" />');
                    $embed.insertAfter($('#target'));
                });
            });
        </script>
    </head>

    <body>
        <button id="target">Load</button>
    </body>
</html>

...the sound gets played when I click the button as it should yet I can't see the resource in the Network panel in the Devloper Tools (F12)
Changing the src attribute to full URL-path does not make any difference.

http://localhost/embed.html HTTP    GET 200 text/html   ...  
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.0.min.js HTTP    GET 200 application/x-javascript    ...

I have disabled caching in the DevTools. Even after I rename the resource I still can't see it in the Network panel. I can see it in my Apache access.log:

192.168.1.203 - - [21/Jun/2014:05:03:32 +0200] "GET /embed.html HTTP/1.1" 200 637
192.168.1.203 - - [21/Jun/2014:05:03:34 +0200] "GET /test.wav HTTP/1.1" 200 25540

I believe the element is being handled by Windows Media Player, I have version 12.0.7601.18150 installed.

Anyone has idea what black magic is this? Is the WMP bypassing MSIE? I'm 100% sure on my PC at work I was able to see all 3 requests MSIE/WMP does for each audio resource.

Jaroslav Záruba

Posted 2014-06-21T03:19:53.283

Reputation: 718

i can see it in ie11 win7, see-.wav-in-ie11-dev-tools.png http://jsfiddle.net/jalbertbowdenii/TKLCh/ tested here with .wav (that you didn't provide ;) ) http://bowdenweb.com/a/i/dev/x/see-.wav-in-ie11-dev-tools.png

– albert – 2014-06-21T21:04:32.723

@albert i mean i can't see it on your screenshot, i can't see the request / the file being downloaded – Jaroslav Záruba – 2014-06-22T00:13:39.987

ahhh...mb...u mean this: http://bowdenweb.com/a/i/dev/x/ie11-f12-dev-tools-.wav-downloaded-in-network-panel.png

– albert – 2014-06-22T05:09:59.570

@albert yes, that, i don't have that here :( i suppose it depends on what's taking care of the EMBED tag in MSIE... I asked friend of mine to test your test+app for me as well, he doesn't see the WAV-request in DevTools either, thanks for the effort man – Jaroslav Záruba – 2014-06-22T12:26:00.877

1interesting...am i testing wrong? happy to help more... – albert – 2014-06-22T17:06:25.647

@albert To be honest, I don't know where is the difference. Your test app does not work in IE8, probably Jsfiddler's fault. But that doesn't even matter. Even in IE11 the behaviour is different from what I have here in our app. I'm only guessing it's because of the different doctype. In your app I don't see the WAV-request(s) in the DevTools. In our app I see 2, and my servlet gets actually hit 3 times. I suppose one of the requests is not coming from the browser but rather directly from the app that is handling the tag. – Jaroslav Záruba – 2014-06-23T07:07:41.177

@albert It seems both DOCTYPE and the handling app (WMP, VLC, ...) make difference when it comes to how many requests are made and how many of tem are made through the browser. – Jaroslav Záruba – 2014-06-23T07:34:58.913

1i was going to ask if emulation was a problem...well let me know if you want me to test something else or any other way i can help. i'm going to ping @iedevchat and see what they know – albert – 2014-06-23T14:14:10.280

Thanks @albert but I have given up. My goal was to find out why the sound played by EMBED gets delayed randomly. Sometimes it plays right away, sometimes it takes tens of seconds (after response from server was returned) before that thing starts playing. (We received a bug reported about IE8 not playing the Captcha audio; in fact it was simply the insane delay.) Luckily it's a WAV so I can use BGSOUND. Sorry for wasting your time, I wasted mine as well if it helps. :) Regards – Jaroslav Záruba – 2014-06-23T22:18:18.327

1no sorries. thats why we are here. i'm genuinely interested but glad you found a solution that works for you. ;) – albert – 2014-06-24T13:55:53.470

MSIE11 Developer Tools not showing requests made by EMBED element

No answers