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If I look at my blog in Chrome or Firefox, it looks as I expect. However, if I try to look at it in IE (11.0.9600.17801) it asks me if I want to download W69NUE8S (or some other random file name), which looks like some binary file.

http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

I tried deleting all my temporary files, but it didn't help.

Anyone any ideas?

Avrohom Yisroel
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1 Answers1

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The issue here appears to be the double-gzipping of the content. This is evident by the headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: public
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding: gzip,gzip
...

Note the doubling-up on the Content-Encoding header. According to an older Firefox bug, this issue affected not only previous versions of Firefox, but also Internet Explorer, versions 8 and up. It appears as though Mobile Safari may also affected by this to some degree.

I was able to decode the content twice via a custom FiddlerScript, and confirm that this remedies the problem in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge.

I'm going to open up a ticket on this for the Networking team to consider. In the meantime, I would encourage you to dial it back a bit, and only encode your out-going content once. This will ensure that users on older Firefox versions, and Internet Explorer will be able to see your content.

If you cannot modify the compression rules, your only other option is to disable it altogether for the time being.

I have replicated this issue here: http://sampsonvideos.com/experiments/gzipgzip.php

Sampson
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  • Thanks for the reply, but it didn't seem to help. I replaced the doctype and html tags as you suggested, but I still get the same problem in IE. – Avrohom Yisroel Jun 11 '15 at 06:24
  • @AvrohomYisroel The issue is caused by double-encoding of the content. Please see my answer above for more information. – Sampson Jun 11 '15 at 07:43
  • thanks for the updated reply, but I'm afraid I don't understand what you're suggesting. I wasn't aware of any zipping going on here. This site is hosted on a third-party server, and I don't have direct control over such things as content encoding (I think, unless they've given me something in the hosting control panel). Please can you explain where and how I'm supposed to modify the encoding. Thanks – Avrohom Yisroel Jun 11 '15 at 10:46
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    I would encourage you to reach out to your host with this information. Basically, they are compressing your page, and then compressing it again. IE decodes it once, but not a second time. – Sampson Jun 11 '15 at 10:51
  • Ah, just noticed that the hosting company have "HTTP Compress" set on by default for all sites. I just switched it off, and the site now loads in IE! Please can you update your answer to make it clear how to fix the problem, and I'll mark it as the answer. Thanks again. – Avrohom Yisroel Jun 11 '15 at 10:54
  • Technically, turning compression off isn't ideal. The ideal solution would be a single round of compression alone. If you don't mind me asking, which host is this? Also, I have updated the answer. – Sampson Jun 11 '15 at 10:57
  • I'm using http://www.smarterasp.net/ for the hosting. I know it's better to have compression on, but I'm not sure how else to get around this problem, as I'm not in charge of the server. – Avrohom Yisroel Jun 11 '15 at 16:54
  • @AvrohomYisroel You'll likely need to contact technical support with your host, and inquire how you can go from compressing already-compressed output, to simply compressing once. I've opened a bug for the IE/MSEdge team to investigate this further from our end. – Sampson Jun 11 '15 at 17:52
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    I had a look in the web.config for the site, and can see that they've added a compression module in there. I guess that's the problem, this is compressing once, ans the hosting's setting was doing it a second time. I guess that turning off compression on the hosting wasn't so bad then, as the content is still being compressed due to this module. At least I know why it was being doubly compressed now. Thanks again. – Avrohom Yisroel Jun 14 '15 at 17:31