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Are there any known issues with older/buggy browsers that claim to support gzip/deflate compression but don't handle it very well? I'm obviously only turning it on for browsers that claim to support it, but for the best user experience, I want to know if there are any browsers I should blacklist.
For some reason, I remember hearing problems about IE6 and gzip, but I'm not sure what the details were.
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HTTP compression is a capability that can be built into web servers and web clients to improve transfer speed and bandwidth utilization.
gzip compressionThis HTTP header is supported in effectively all browsers.
BREACH (a backronym: Browser Reconnaissance and Exfiltration via Adaptive Compression of Hypertext) is a security vulnerability against HTTPS when using HTTP compression. BREACH is built based on the CRIME security exploit.
When you want to check if content is compressed, you have to look at the content encoding of the response, and to check if the content length changes between compressed and uncompressed content. For example, this is a compressed object, notice the Content-Encoding header and the object size.
Here are some links to documents that name some browsers that don’t support compression though claiming it:
Content-Encoding: gzip?
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The IE6 problem was that before IE6sp1 it could lose the first 2048 bytes of data in a compressed response: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q312496
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