Sunday, November 16, 2008

IE6 hangs when downloading compressed images from AWS S3

Like many new sites we store uploaded user images to S3. We are always trying to improve the experience of users so recently we started compressing these images using gzip.

Well, it turns out that for some reason IE6 completely freezes for about 10 minutes when trying to download one of these files. Of course no problems in any other browser.

Luckily IE6 is only 12% of our user base, so now we are forced to have zipped and unzipped images.
Argh IE6! Save the developers!

I hope this helps someone as it drove us nuts trying to figure it out.

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