I was handing off a recently created application to a few of my bosses and coworkers when one of them noticed that that page was constantly refreshing/reloading over and over. The page never fully finished loading before the next reload/refresh would occur. I scoured the internet before I found an article about a guy who was experiencing a similar problem only with HTML emails in Outlook. A reply to the article said that Internet Explorer, which Outlook Express uses to render HTML email message, does not properly decompress gzip pages. Sure enough, Internet Explorder has a gzip bug that is both known and has a hotfix for.
For those of you wondering what gzip output is, it allows a systems administrator to send webpages as gzip compressed archives (much like a WinZip file), which are then uncompressed by IE/Mozilla/Firefox and rendered as HTML/images. Well, evidently, IE doesn’t do this properly. So the fix was to comment out output_method=ob_gzhandler in my php.ini file.
Internet Explorer sucks and cost me 2 hours of work today. Thanks Microsoft!
Why not just grab the browser header and if they are using IE, do not enable gzip?
if (!$ie)
{
// enable gzip
}
Taking this approach also has its merits since IE will appear slower, and FF / Moz will appear much faster, therefore contributing to the decline in IE in some small way.
I guess I could have done that. But, I needed to launch the service ASAP, blah, blah, blah (you know the routine).
Funny stuff – I noticed free e-mail @explorersucks.com
It is at http://www.explorersucks.com/email/
By the looks of the main page, they support Firefox.