Many have observed the non-trivial nature of IE when viewing dynamic PDF documents. You know, the interesting ones that go beyond flat files on a static web server somewhere. It seems that IE will usually request a binary stream several times — often with unpredictable results. The only solution that is known to work reliably is to use the EMBED tag with IE and a regular link to your PDF (or dynamic web page that produces PDF) for all other browsers.

This particular problem exposed itself during a Websphere 5.1 to Websphere 6.1 migration. For some unknown reason, Websphere 6.1 decided to add a Cache-Control: no-cache header to the response. This caused IE to render a blank page — just what the user wanted :-) We couldn’t eliminate the header, but using the EMBED tag solved the problem. Interestingly, pages with frames containing dynamic pages worked fine.