Author: rividh
Description:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritors_(William_Golding) is one of the affected pages, but I've seen 3 or 4 others today that do the same thing: in an older browser, which normally renders Wikipedia as very legible plain text, I am getting naked GZIP (compressed to binary). The affected pages work fine in a newer browser. It is reproduceable for the affected pages, however these may be random pages (tomorrow it may affect some other pages!)
When I save the file (exactly as sent to me by the server) locally, and look at it with a hex viewer, I confirmed that it is a compressed binary, not text. QuickViewPlus IDs the file as UNIX GZip. However QVP decompresses not to text (HTML) but rather, to this interesting goulash (sample from first line):
/*::lh1 clasl1-first="Mjnt="pagn lhrefead> faviaml:: WerSub">Frrplal:RecconChontes i_ lfeed=ds"mft/fh3yla hxml: clasl1yla hxml: jump&am-
Might this indicate that the GZip is corrupt, thus not being decoded by the unforgiving older browser? (If so, might this indicate a corrupt cache file or a hard disk going bad?)
I saved and looked at some working pages and confirmed that NORMALLY, my old browser sees perfectly normal HTML.
I've encountered this "what do you mean, some pages arrive in GZip?" issue on another site where I was able to research the problem, and that proved due to a server bug, tho I don't recall the details as it was some years ago.
Affected browser: Netscape 3 (still wonderful for READING TEXT!)
Not affected (same system): Seamonkey 1.1.9
This is not a matter of NS3 not knowing what to do with GZip; most servers now use compression, and finding myself with naked GZip is VERY rare (this is maybe the 3rd or 4th time I've seen it in 12 years online).
Version: unspecified
Severity: major
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritors_(William_Golding)