FrodoHobbits wrote:Mark, Thanks for the info, didn't realise IE8 was so f%*ked up.
Frodo,
I don't think it is a big problem, just a little bug. If I understand correctly web server compresses file using gzip compression (gzip this is not the same as zip!) and expects that browser will decompress (un-gzip) the file. So zip file is actually one more time compressed with gzip by web server. Browser should un-gzip the file and deliver in this case zip file to the user. But IE8 does not do the following, but instead just leaves the file in gzip format. So Mark has been able to un-compress the compressed file with 7-zip utility that is able to handle multiple compression files (also zip and also gzip). Mark probably thought it is zip file because extension was .zip, but it was actually gzip file which just had zip extension. But 7-zip does not look into extension to determinate the file type, but it looks into file's header where it was gzip compression defined and so it just decompressed the file without any error. But it looks like the zip file lost extension (probably some simple bug), so renaming file to .zip and then un-compress the file with Windows zip utility solves the problem.
But this does not mean that IE8 is not able to correctly download zip files. IE8 correctly downloads zip files if web server does not gzip files before sending them. So it may be also the problem of web server, that sends file in format that browser can't handle. Work-around for this problem is in this case is to web administrators to disable gziping files settings which is most probably set as default settings or disable this settings if IE8 is downloading the file.
There is probably a problem, that web server incorrectly understands the browser request for gzip handling or browser incorrectly requests to accept gziped file. Welcome to the world of non-standard browser behavior. I have red on Microsoft blog, that new version of Internet Explorer 9 (it will be release and the end of next year) will fully support web standards, so it will pass ACID3 web standard test:
http://acid3.acidtests.org/ Now IE8 only gets 20% of tests passed. If you look into older versions of IE like IE7 or IE6 they passes even less percent. Firefox 3.5 passes 93%, Google Chrome passes 100% and Apple Safari 100% too.
Back to the topic, I am not sure this is only IE8 problem, I have been seeing notification messages on IBM web pages for some years now, that zip files should not be downloaded with Internet Explorer and so use Firefox instead.
But I have also seen some web pages that does not correctly download PDF by Firefox, but successfully downloads with Internet Explorer. My humble opinion is that web server administrator should check if web pages are working with the most used browsers that visit there web page. It is also a nice practice to offer MD5 checksum for all the files that are offered to download, so user can check if file is correctly downloaded or not. So not only the blame for the browser, but also some blame to web administrators, not doing the job as they should.
Regards