We have recently been experimenting with enabling gzip/deflate compression via our Apache/Tomcat cluster, but have encountered some problems with the way the compression works with the Firebox browser.
When Firefox brings up a compressed page for the first time, it looks fine. If they reload a static html page, bizarre things start to happen. In some cases, garbage just gets displayed on screen (looks like the actual gzip encoded stream), and other times Firefox displays a dialog box asking if you want to download the html files. When IE is used, it works fine. Some background: Running two-node Tomcat 5.5.4 cluster using JK2 2.0.4 protocol to communicate back to Apache2 2.0.52 for load balancing. Browsers tried were Firefox 1.0.3 and Internet Explorer 6.0. If I use Tomcat's gzip compression alone with Firefox, it works fine. It's only when we through in Apache and JK2 into the mix with the cluster that Firefox displays charged. It seems to be an issue related to the way that compressed pages get cached. I'm not sure if the problem lies with Tomcat, Apache, JK2, or Firefox itself. Can anyone provide some pointers? Thanks. Regards, B.J. Guillot
