> >> Actually that is a very good question... why are we not using
> >> mod_deflate?
>
> > Good question. It's definitly worth investigating.
>
> What are we talking about here --- some hack to make users'
> web browsers decompress pages on-the-fly?
Yes.
> How much does that
> slow down the browsing experience, if you've got an old slow
> PC? (I can believe that if you've got a fast PC and a slow
> internet connection, it could make things faster overall ...
> but the breakeven point is not obvious.)
In most cases it's faster or unnoticably slower. At the speed your
machine would have to be to notice the problem, I don't think you can
load a modern-enough browser to actually look at the site.
> What are the odds
> that people using older browsers will be locked out entirely?
They should be zero, if you use mod_deflate.
The browser sends an Accept-encoding: deflate (or similar, I'm not 100%
on the name of the header, and too lazy to look it up). If this is not
present in the request, an uncompressed version of the page is sent back
to the browser.
//Magnus