Which browsers claim to support HTTP compression but are actually flaky?

Question

Are there any known issues with older/buggy browsers that claim to support gzip/deflate compression but don't handle it very well? I'm obviously only turning it on for browsers that claim to support it, but for the best user experience, I want to know if there are any browsers I should blacklist.

For some reason, I remember hearing problems about IE6 and gzip, but I'm not sure what the details were.

Answer 1

The IE6 problem was that before IE6sp1 it could lose the first 2048 bytes of data in a compressed response: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q312496

Answer 2

Citing user Greg Dan's answer from question What is the problem with this ajax(with prototype)?:

Sometime ago I read about IE and Apache gzip module problems. It was occurring only on local installations where a server response was very fast.

Never tried anything like that myself, only read that answer recently. Maybe it helps.

Answer 3

Here are some links to documents that name some browsers that don’t support compression though claiming it:

• Apache’s sample configuration in the mod_deflate module documentation
• Which browsers can handle Content-Encoding: gzip?