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From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bj=F8rn_Stabell?= <bjorn@exoweb.net>
Subject: Standard MSIE tweaks for Apache
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:09:12 +0800
To: dev@httpd.apache.org

After switching to Apache 2.2.1 (the unreleased version) we found MS  
IE could no longer access our site (which has keepalive, mod_deflate,  
mod_proxy, and mod_ssl).  At first I thought it was a keepalive or  
cipher problem, but it turned out to be a problem with IE (6.0) not  
being able to handle compressed (mod_deflate) files other than text/ 
html.  Does this ring a bell?

We're now using the following "IE hacks":

#
# IE hacks
# - IE 1-4 cannot handle keepalive w/ SSL, and doesn't do HTTP 1.1 well
# - all IE has problems with compression of non-html stuff (like css  
and js),
#   also make sure we vary on User-Agent if we do conditional  
compression
#
BrowserMatch "MSIE" ssl-unclean-shutdown gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch "MSIE [1-4]" nokeepalive downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:js|css)$        vary-user-agent
Header append Vary User-Agent env=vary-user-agent
[...]

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/ 
xhtml text/javascript application/x-javascript application/xhtml+xml  
application/xml text/css


So, my questions are:

1) Anything missing from the above config?

2) Shouldn't there be a standard "IE hacks" configuration for  
Apache?  Maybe even a "mod_ie_hacks"?

3) Instead of matching on .js and .css in the URI, it would be great  
to have something more robust; is there any way to do this?  (Based  
on content-type, or based on the fact that the content would've been  
compressed but wasn't because of some env variable was set.)

IE is still a pretty popular browser, it's relatively important to  
handle it well ;)


Rgds,
Bjorn