After digging for a day and a night in the guts of the internets, here is what I came up with:
server-sent events – Very cool, currently works only in Opera, but may be part of HTML5 and other browsers may support it sometime. Adds a new element tag with content-type of “application/x-dom-event-stream” which allows the Server to fire events in the Client DOM. And it should not show a progress indicator, as far as I understand. It’s also a working draft of a standard, and not a hack like the whole iframe comet thing.
XMLHttpRequest – in Firefox and Safari, but not in IE, it can be used for long-pull page loading that enables to handle fragments as they appear on each readyStateChange event. Will not show progress indicator*. — see comment below
ActiveXObject(“htmlfile”) – can be used in IE to create a page/window that is outside of the current window scope. This makes the progress indicator go away! The loaded iframe will be in an invisible browser.
More about server-sent-events:
- http://my.opera.com/WebApplications/blog/show.dml/438711
And more about the other two techniques (also explains the problem better):
* http://meteorserver.org/browser-techniques/
Even more in-depth about each technique, and more techniques:
- http://cometdaily.com/2007/12/11/the-future-of-comet-part-1-comet-today/
- http://cometdaily.com/2008/01/10/the-future-of-comet-part-2-html-5’s-server-sent-events/