Facebook not showing og:image thumbnail in MSIE9 on subsequent shares

Question

I'm having a bizarre problem with Facebook. When I share my content in MSIE 9, it successfully loads the thumbnail the first time I share a URL, but if I share it again, the thumbnail does not load (and never loads again). It just shows their animated "loading" image for several seconds, then that disappears and so do the thumbnail options.

You can see this yourself by clicking these Facebook share links in MSIE 9.

Example 1 Example 2

The same sharing functionality works fine in other browsers, and sharing other pages (e.g. Youtube videos) from the same MSIE 9 works fine every time.

Running Facebook's debugger does not resolve the problem, nor does it report any problems with the OpenGraph tags on my page. It even shows the thumbnails in question.

Looking at the Network tab of the Developer Tools in Facebook shows that the thumbnail image is being loaded each time I share the content.

Update

I've found that MSIE 9 will display the image under the following conditions: - if I have the image in my cache already - if the browser doesn't make a request to the server to the safe_image.php URL where the image comes from.

I've been messing around with this test page: http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://c2a-v3-staging.s3.amazonaws.com/sparks%2Fspark_5079%2Findex_test.html

I cannot load the image if I refresh the page, as that makes a request to the server for safe_image.php. It doesn't matter whether the response is a 200 or a 304, the image does not display. However, if I then go to the location bar and press enter, that's a "navigate" event instead of a "refresh", no request is made for the image, and it is displayed (after being loaded from the cache).

I've tried serving the image from another domain, adding the og:image:secure_url tag, having Facebook crawl the HTML on a different domain, and this is the best I can do so far. Unfortunately, it's pretty useless because it means the first share from any user will never work right.

Answer 1

the sharer function of fb is no longer supported by facebook you should use the feed dialog part of javascript api: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/feed/

also make sure your og meta tags contain the correct information http://ogp.me/ that could be your problem, the image size is a meta tag and the image should be 200x200 at least to optimize the scraping of the og meta data

you can also check what errors the meta data is getting from https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug