Hello,
I recently came across this blog post which basically says that we should not GZip content before it is sent to FireFox. The reason why is because FireFox performs poorly with GZipped content. I was very surprised to hear this.
Does anyone know if there is any validity to this blog post?
This seems like it might help some people (if it's still true) who have fast enough connections for this to not matter. If you have a 100KB page and the person downloading it has a connection that downloads at 5 KB a second I bet that person hopes you weren't trying to do him a favor by not gzipping your content. There's also the bandwidth savings on your end to consider too. It seems like a bad idea to disable it for anyone.
After reading it, I would say no, there is no validity to that blog post. None, in fact.
The writer just says "gzipping in Firefox 2 is slow". In fact, he says "eons slower". That's not really a measurement I'd base any application decisions on, as there is clearly some hyperbole there. What this should indicate to you is that one person somewhere found that Firefox on some computer somewhere was seemingly slower when gzipped content on some server was turned on.
There's no benchmarks, or steps to reproduce, or indication of what kind of server settings were used or what kind of test output was sent.
At best, I would say if you're concerned about this, take a few minutes to run your own tests. Otherwise, I wouldn't put any stock in it unless someone comes up with a much more deterministic set of results.
I can only imagine that being valid if you have a fast pipe between the server and the client.
If there is anything in between - like the internet - I'd bet it's poor advice.