Poor iOS 6, it just can’t catch a break. Everyone is harping on its maps, and as if native app issues weren’t enough, mobile Safari is encountering some problems. Sarah Perez, over at TechCrunch, noticed that when she visited some mobile websites the load indicator (I’m with Sarah in not quite knowing what to call this) that spins in the top left hand corner of the phone while a site is supposedly still loading, just never stops. She found it annoying, but after doing a bit of outreach and digging (like a journalist does) she discovered that it’s actually a bug that is adversely effecting some mobile web developers. Here’s what Sarah found (mostly from a post by Greg O’Lone of Real Software):

The problem is related to something called long polling, and that’s something that affects your usage of a lot of AJAX web apps in Safari (apps that use HTML, CSS and JavaScript, as many modern-day web applications now do). …

So here’s what’s happening. When a browser loads a website, it often has a few simultaneous connections going to pull for content. For example, images may be loaded at the same time as the main page content. Long polling, then, is something that’s used to show you new content (AJAX style) without the end user having to refresh the entire page. It does this by holding one connection open.

O’Lone says that in iOS 6, the normal process is all messed up, basically. Instead of letting an app and server use multiple connections, only one connection at a time is allowed. Because only one connection at time works, other requests – like those for images, for example – are prevented being sent to the server until the first request times out.

Read the full article at TechCrunch >>>

Apparently someone on Hacker News thinks its a different issue, but still connected to long polling. Either way, it’s a fairly big bug that effects major sites like Google’s web apps.

Have you noticed this bug? Has it effected any of the mobile websites you use or test?