You know we love Microsoft here at Port80. Deep down, Redmond always means well, but with a platform like Windows, IIS, Internet Explorer, etc., that’s a heck of a lot of moving parts, and things can break. We even try to help with our products, but folks, they really broke IE6 with a recent patch in conjunction with HTTP compression -- check this out:
http://www.computerweekly.com/Home/Articles/2006/08/16/217755/Microsoft+security+patch+crashes+browsers.htm .
It makes you wonder why the Microsoft Internet Explorer team wouldn't test compatibility with HTTP compression, something the largest, high traffic sites like Google, EBay, and Amazon use -- hey, I guess not. It’s like the change was made without anybody browsing the damn Internet with the patch applied!
So, for the next week or so, you can imagine the annoyances you might hear from users who crash with their IE patched browsers on ANY HTTP compressed site or Web-based app using mod_gzip, native IIS 6 compression, our products, our competitor’s products, appliances, and on and on....
Our suggestion to admins with compressed sites for the next week: just flip the switch OFF on HTTP compression for one week if you have a production site with lots of traffic, as some folks may crash in IE6 right now. You can add an exclusion rule for a week in our ZipEnable or httpZip products for IE6. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sites, particularly in the open source community, browser sniffing and then sending IE6 browsers to a page that says: “Microsoft broke compression. Try Firefox instead”. Now, that would be mean, but we are sorry to say in this case maybe not uncalled for.
Message to Redmond: someone or many someones in the IE QA department need to be fired, as their oversight has messed the entire Web up here... Until the patch is out next Tuesday, August 22!
- Port80