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Internet Explorer 6 and HTTP compression

Recently I wrote about installing mod_gzip on CentOS 5. However since then I have discovered that Internet Explorer 6 has does not support this properly, and intermittently does not load items properly!

To resolve this I had to change the Apache configuration. This is the configuration that I am now using:

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AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.[0678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE\s7 !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch \bOpera !no-gzip
Header append Vary User-Agent

This turns off the HTTP compression based on their user agent.

Here are some of the known issues:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321722/EN-US/ (IE5.5, IE6 and IE6SP1 always cache gzip encoded content)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;LN;Q312496 (IE6http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;823386&Product=ie600 (IE6sp1, compressed HTML pages only partially appear)

And this is one of the sites I found to help with the resolution:
http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/Blog/147/

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Apache. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Internet Explorer 6 and HTTP compression”

  1. […] 2. Configure the deflate module All that was required was to add the following lines to the Apache configuration file. AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.[0678] no-gzip BrowserMatch bMSIEs7 !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch bOpera !no-gzip Header append Vary User-Agent Update 26/08/2008: Originally I only had the first line of the above configuration. However it turns out that there are issues with Internet Explorer 6 and HTTP compression. […]

  2. […] be IE6 still accounts for something close to 10% of web traffic – more on my site.  Paul Turner documented how to change httpd.conf in his blog so that IE6 users don’t get compression.  I’m happy to […]

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