IE8 prompting to download jQuery JSON response

I had a few JSON calls which IE8 was prompting me to download/save the response rather than simply hand it to jQuery to do it’s thing.

The returned JSON had the “correct” header and no other browsers were experiencing any issue:

header('Content-type: application/json');

To get around the IE8 issue, I had to change the header of the returned JSON to return text/plain:

header('Content-type: text/plain');

and ensure that my JSON calls had the dataType “json” specified. Without this explicitly specified, the browser was unable to parse the returned JSON.

$.ajax({
	type: "POST",
	dataType: "json",
	url: URL,
	data:data,
	success: function(data){
		alert(data.status)
	}
});

Boom!

As an extra note, I was also using dropzone.js for drag and drop file uploads. Dropzone.js doesn’t allow you to force the datatype of the response so I had to convert the response to JSON before doing anything with it with:

JSON.parse(responseText);

(Note, JSON.parse is only supported in modern browsers, this was not an issue though for me though as only modern browsers were able to use the dropzone functionality anyway and I had a fallback in place for older browsers)