GMail Failing to Compress Content Properly

[Ian]

Hello All,

GMail (and Google at large) 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!!!

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

[what]

This is plain evel.
Somebody please fix this soon- i am on dialup :(

[Ohadi Langis]

Opera 7.54 does not do well with GMAIL. In fact, Google asserts GMAIL
does not support Opera 7.54. Later this year Opera will release a new
version of their browser. A beta release is available to the public at
http://www.opera.com/ It is expected this version of Opera when shipped
will work well with GMAIL.

[adagioinb]

Hello!

> Opera 7.54 does not do well with GMAIL. In fact,

Doesn't work at all, in fact.

However,....

> Later this year Opera will release a new
> version of their browser. A beta release is available to the public at
> http://www.opera.com/ It is expected this version of Opera when shipped
> will work well with GMAIL.

Opera 7.6 preview versions, and the 8.0 beta work with GMail just
fine. Using it NOW, in fact!

Respectfully,
Ruth

--
For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good
work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. (Phil 1:6 NNAS)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ adagioinb (at) gmail.com ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Using Gmail in Opera 8.0beta

[Ian]

Opera 8 is working fine. The issue is one of discrimination. Google,
due to poor web development practices are wrongly sending GMail pages
to Opera uncompressed.

Google engineers just need to learn how to make sure the browser sends
a gzip accept header and is NOT netscape 4 (it would take about 10
minutes!). More simply, just adding Opera to their browser sniffing
would easily prevent this discrimination on all Google pages...