Web Progress Bar on Mac

[Brendan Smith]

There's a point in our ASP.NET application where we fire off a web
service asynchronously on post-back, then monitor the progress of the
web service until it completes. While the service is running, we
manipulate a client-side progress bar using a stream of javascript
that dynamically manipulates the size of the progress bar image. We
keep the response open until the web service is complete, and
periodically flush the response object on progress events.

This works great on IE 5.5 on Windows, but IE 5.1 and 5.2 on the Mac
don't like it at all. Even though the page is clearly receiving all
the javascript from the open response, the progress bar images are
only updated every minute or so. I'm not sure why this happens, or if
there's anything we can do to make the page update immediately. It
updates as soon as the request is closed, which suggests to me that IE
for the Mac isn't as eager to render incoming content as IE for
Windows.

Any suggestions?