What does 'Accept: */*' mean under Client section of Request Headers?

Question

I was comparing headers of same HTTP Post request for Firefox and Internet Explorer and I see that for IE.

I was wondering:

What does Accept: */* mean under Client section of Request Headers?

Answer 1

The accept: header defines the content type the client accepts, or expects to be returned by the server. Depending on the situation this can be text/css, text/html, image/png, .. etc. - just some mime type.

The * character is considered the wildcard. accept: */* simply means that any data of whatever mimetype is accepted and the server may choose what to return to the requesting client.