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Is there still an issue with GZIP encoding S3-delivered static assets? From my reading, it looks like Amazon will not automatically convert assets to to GZIP encoding when the browser indicates support. Rather, you have to upload GZIPed files and manually configure the content encoding headers. This approach would be broken for browsers that don't support GZIPed files.

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Which browsers don't support gzip?

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/11/11/whos-not-getting... (just googled your post, this was pretty informative)

Thanks, but that's from 2009 and isn't entirely relavent. Those stats are for incoming requests that don't specify that they accept gzip, not that they can't use it. Often this is caused by proxies stripping headers from the request.

I remember reading an article, I believe by Google, about using browser sniffing instead of encoding headers to determine if gzip should be used. I can't find it now but the conclusion was that it's almost entirely safe to use gzip 100% of the time.

I believe some mobile browsers do not support GZIP - but I don't have the data. Presumably older models (a dying breed) - but returning GZIP'ed content without receiving the appropriate accepts header is non-compliant with the HTTP standard.

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