My site is gzipped compressed, and it doesn't load properly in IE. It works fine in FF/Chrome, but in IE, the only thing that pops up is a box asking to download the .gz file which contains the html document for the page.
Is this normal? Do I have to turn off gzip?
Are you sending the correct headers?
You need to send the
Content-Encoding: gzip
header for IE to understand that it is gzipped (Firefox, et al are smart enough to detect this automatically)
I have seen problems when using gzip with Internet Explorer on a page that has flash on it. If your page has flash this may be why. I don't remember the cause and at the time we found it it was causing problems on a live site so we just disabled gzip for Internet Explorer to get around it.
One thing to add - you should turn off gzip compression for IE6 pre-SP2. Before SP2, IE6 doesn't always read and cache gzipped content properly and you end up with mangled code.
You can identify an IE6 SP2 install by looking for "SV1" in the user-agent string.