Page Load Error - compression problems

It would help if you provided the URL of the web page you were visiting!

Anyway, I just encountered this with:

  http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/293215

wireshark indicates that the returned HTTP headers are as follows:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK

Cache-Control: private,max-age=0

Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:13:50 GMT

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Expires: Wed, 01 Jan 1997 12:00:00 GMT

Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

P3P: CP="ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI"

X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727

Set-Cookie: .ASPXANONYMOUS=AtJ86nrXyAEkAAAAOWFhMWY1MzQtNzIxMC00NGE1LTg2YzItZDhjNzhjM2VjZWZkMOqqFMWgbg12gYuW_4NE0z768Kg1; expires=Thu, 26-Jun-2008 10:53:50 GMT; path=/; HttpOnly

Content-Encoding: gzip

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

X-Cache: MISS from riva.pelham.vpn.ucam.org

X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from riva.pelham.vpn.ucam.org:3128

Via: 1.0 riva.pelham.vpn.ucam.org:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE5)

Proxy-Connection: close

Content-Encoding: gzip and Transfer-Encoding: chunked don't seem like unreasonable encodings?

That said, w3m says "gzip: stdin: not in gzip format". Hmm.

I'm using the 64bit version of Hardy and encounter the same problem on a subset of sites. I can workaround the problem by settting network.http.accept-encoding to a blank string, but this breaks other sites.

Here are some more sites that don't work:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitaltv/a93556/virgin-media-ceo-attacks-net-neutrality.html
http://www.pocketinformant.com/Forums/

PocketInformant Headers:
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Fri, 02 May 2008 11:06:47 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g DAV/2 SVN/1.4.6
Set-Cookie: wbmainsession_id=XXXXXXXXXXXX; path=/; domain=pocketinformant.com; httponly
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Expires: 0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html;charset=iso-8859-1
X-Cache: MISS from XXXXXXXXXXX
Connection: close

Headers from digitalspy
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Fri, 02 May 2008 11:09:45 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (FreeBSD) PHP/5.2.5
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.5
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cache: MISS from XXXXXXXXXX
Connection: close

I am having the same problem in several pages. Normally I get the error message the first time I try to load the page and if I reload it then it works

do you still see this problem with latest firefox (3.0.3). Please update your instructions to reproduce. Also look whether you have any extension installed that could cause this. If in doubt disable your extensions.

The following sites still do not work:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitaltv/a93556/virgin-media-ceo-attacks-net-neutrality.html
http://www.pocketinformant.com/Forums/

Tested using 3.0.3+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1, AMD64 in safe mode "firefox -safe-mode"

Have the same problem. I get only the following error message when trying to visit thinkgeek.com:
"Content Encoding Error
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression."

Latest 32-bit Ubuntu Intrepid and latest Firefox 3.0.3 were used. HTTP headers for futher information:

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: www.thinkgeek.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008101315 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.3

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

Accept-Language: ru,de;q=0.8,en;q=0.5,en-us;q=0.3

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

Connection: keep-alive

Cache-Control: no-cache

Pragma: no-cache

HTTP/1.x 200 OK

Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:29:10 GMT

Expires: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:29:10 GMT

Pragma: no-cache

Cache-Control: no-cache

Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.31 mod_perl/1.31-rc4 OpenSSL/0.9.8g

Content-Type: text/html

Vary: Accept-Encoding, User-Agent

Content-Encoding: gzip

Transfer-Encoding: chunked, chunked

confirming this problem on 32 bit Intrepid Ibex.

www.bloomberg.com is the culprit here. My dad has been having this problem on and off on this machine for the last month or so. Although a simple restart did seem to fix it (temporarily I'm assuming)

I'm not sure it is even a Firefox issue. Not really sure what it is. I have the problem with thinkgeek.com not loading, however, it loads fine on the same install at a different location. For example, I can not load thinkgeek on my laptop at my home internet connection, but it loads fine at work with the internet there. Same browser, OS install, everything. The only thing that has changed is the internet service provider. At home I have Alltel Wireless Broadband, while at work it is the local phone company's DSL service. I don't know how much this insight will be, but here it is for anyone to ponder over.

~Alan Burbol

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 12:32:08AM -0000, Alan Burbol wrote:
> I'm not sure it is even a Firefox issue. Not really sure what it is. I
> have the problem with thinkgeek.com not loading, however, it loads fine
> on the same install at a different location. For example, I can not load
> thinkgeek on my laptop at my home internet connection, but it loads fine
> at work with the internet there. Same browser, OS install, everything.
> The only thing that has changed is the internet service provider. At
> home I have Alltel Wireless Broadband, while at work it is the local
> phone company's DSL service. I don't know how much this insight will be,
> but here it is for anyone to ponder over.

Sounds like a provider issue ... probably a transparent proxy that
misbehaves. Could even be that the transparent proxy goes crazy
because it sees a ubuntu specfic user agent.

 - Alexander

I had this problem on another website and documented it here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1121902

in "about:config" Try modifying "network.http.accept-encoding" to be "gzip,deflate;q=0.9,compress;q=0.7"

Hello,
When setting the value to "gzip,deflate;q=0.9,compress;q=0.7", some web sites do not display correctly anymore but instead show a full page of binary characters, for instance :
http://processorfinder.intel.com/Default.aspx
http://www.lalibre.be
http://store.apple.com/be-nl
http://www.siemenselectromenager.be/
http://www.bosch-home.be/fr

I have not found any reports of this side-effect yet.

Hello,
For the 5 URLs that I mentioned, as soon the HTTP "quality" (q=..) is specified for "deflate" algorithm, the problems occurs.
The following value works better as a workaround :
gzip,deflate,compress;q=0.7
but I am not sure whether it still fixes the original problem ("invalid or unsupported form of compression").

Happened to me today with http://ant.apache.org/ (though not https://ant.apache.org/ which works fine). Clearing FF cache did not help. Googling however turned up a partial workaround: press Ctrl-F5. Have to press this on every page on the site I visit before it will be displayed, and even then it is not guaranteed to work. Pages display fine in links.

[Reference: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/ant-dev/201002.mbox/browser and search for "http://ant.apache.org/ broken in FF" (not archived yet as of this writing)]

[Expired for firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]