how to get around "Content-encoding gzip deflate" header sent by Chrome?

Question

We have a simple HTML login form on our embedded device's web server. The web server is custom coded because of severe memory limitations. Regardless of these limitations, we like Chrome and would like to support it.

All browsers post an HTTP Request to our login form containing the expected "username=myname&password=mypass" string, but not Chrome. Instead we receive from Chrome a "Content-encoding gzip deflate" request. BTW, by "all browsers", I mean this was tested to work fine on Internet Explorer versions 9 beta, 8, 7, 6 ; Firefox versions 4 beta, 3, 2 ; Opera 10, 9 ; Safari 5, 4, 3 ; and SeaMonkey 2.

Referring to section "14.2 Accept Charset" of the w3.org's http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html we tried sending back a HTTP 406 code to indicate that this server does not support that encoding in the hope that Chrome would try again and post the expected strings the standard way. The 406 code returned by the web server is clearly displayed in Chrome's "Inspect Element" window, but it seems to be treated by Chrome as an error code, and no further requests are sent to the web server. "Login failed." We also tried HTTP return codes 405 and 200, same result.

Is there a way to get around this behavior either with client-side JavaScript that will prevent Chrome from sending the "Content-encoding gzip deflate" request, or with a server-side response that will explain nicely to Chrome we don't do gzip, just send it to us the regular way?

We tried posting to the Google Chrome Troubleshooting forum with no response.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Best regards, Bert

Answer 1

You're looking in the wrong section for the error code: Section 14.11 of RFC 2616 specifies that you send a 415 (Unsupported Media Type) if you can't deal with the Content-Encoding.