Hello All,
Google seems to have a fairly fundamental misconfiguration of their
servers, whereby any browser who doesn't have "Mozilla" or "MSIE" in
their user agent string are sent uncompressed data thus (often greatly)
increasing loading time in those browsers.
For example, using Opera (which can spoof its user agent string) -
GMail is the example here but this applies to both Search and News (at
least, and probably everything):
I used Ethereal to log all packets sent between GMail and Opera:
ID as Mozilla: 123,696 bytes transmitted in 5.76 seconds
ID as Opera: 275,710 bytes transmitted in 9.06 seconds
On dial-up that would cause some ~25seconds longer loading time!!!
As any fairly elementary web programmer should know, browsers send a
string that allows a server to know if it is possible to compress web
content:
Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, x-gzip, identity, *;q=0
It would be very sensible if, instead of discriminatory and buggy
browser sniffing, Google engineers first actually used Accept-Encoding
to decide when to send compressed pages to a web browser.
Thanks,
Ian
