php - Why is gzip compression with Internet Explorer not working?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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 - even though they shouldn't!)

In PHP, you can do this using:-

header('Content-Encoding: gzip');