Today I learned that Internet Explorer limits the site of GET requests to 2,083 characters.  Any URL longer than this cannot be used by the web browser.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427

I can’t help but wonder where that number comes from?  The closest power is 11 (2^11=2048), which doesn’t correspond at all to this limit.  Is it arbitrary?  Other web browsers (Firefox, Safari) do not have this limitation.