Surfing on Google, there are some problems on Safari Mobile (article 1, article 2, article 3, article 4, article 5). They sound like not same as what I am facing to. I monitor the packets captured by Wireshark, and found that Safari Mobile didn't load all resources(css, js, ttf, etc.) completely causes this problem. The Safari Mobile communicates with Web server in HTTP pipeline, while the others (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE, Safari Desktop, etc.) don't. (The others will reuse the connection, but won't pipeline them). That is the major difference!
In theory, the HTTP pipeline can speed up requests by reducing the number of round trip times. But there are some articles(articles 6, article 7, article 8) comment on this point. This is not what I want to discuss in this page. Let's back to my problem.
The HTTP pipeline raises lots of problem. Some developers submit tickets to Apple, but there is no plan to solve the problem. I try to find
I found an easy workaround for this issue at last. This problem can be solved by setting the connection field of the HTTP response header. I force the connection field to be "close" if the browser is Safari, and it works! In Java Servlet, you can set it as
response.setHeader("Connection", "close");
(or you can set the header field in Filter), or in PHP
header("Connection: close");
or you can set the field in Web server setting.
In Safari Mobile, it will close the connection when receive the response, and won't send further requests thru this connection. That is, no more HTTP pipeline from Safari Mobile. I am not sure is this the best solution or not, but it really solve my problem.
