Jonathan's Musings

I just encountered a weird problem which took a while to sort out, so I thought I would share.

If you are using symbolic links to ZIP files on your server, they will download fine in Firefox but not Internet Explorer (IE) if you are using GZip compression in Apache (mod_deflate).

To fix this, turn off compression for ZIP files (which should not need to be compressed further anyway) by adding the following line to your Apache configuration file(s) in the appropriate location:

# Don't compress ZIP files
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:zip)$ no-gzip dont-vary

That will stop ZIP files from being GZipped and help IE to not fall over itself...

Hope this saves you some time.