Firefox and AVG

[petern]

I created a new website over the last couple of weeks and was showing it to a colleague at work only to have a Problem Loading Page with a reference to unsupported file compression issues (can't remember the exact wording). After a fair bit of searching I was able to find the culprit: AVG Free and its LinkScanner component. Once I disabled LinkScanner the pages would load. I haven't determined yet whether the problem will go away for potential clients once the website is found by search engines and scanned, etc or not. This is particularly annoying since the website is nothing but text and a couple of photos. No code or fancy stuff whatever.

If anyone has any helpful suggestions about dealing with this from the website side (in terms of making AVG happy) I'd appreciate it. Otherwise just a word to the wise if they run into the same problem. Interestingly enough, Internet Explorer works fine from the same computer.

[stuck]

I'm not sure if my experience of not being able to reach a particular web site because FF reported a 'content encoding error' is relevant in your case but who knows...

When the old Woody's Lounge switched software from wwwthreads to IP Board 2 (just over a year ago) I was unable to reach the new version of the site. FF told me there was a problem and mentioned page compression. In my case the problem was because I was behind a firewall and the proxy didn't pass on the pages, served with gzip compression, correctly. I had to edit my FF config file and modify the line:
network.http.accept-encoding
from 'gzip,deflate' to '*'.

Much Googling along the way turned up this post:
http://blog.1911census.co.uk/2009/01/co ... ing-error/
which seemed to fit my circumstances, though as a mere user I was not able to do anything and had to wait until the firewall was tweaked to fix another issue.

You say you tried to show your site to a colleague at work but you don't say if the site is hosted 'off site' or not but since you do say you can work around your problem by turning off LinkScanner, hence I doubt this is relevant anyway!

Ken

[petern]

Thanks for the comments Ken. These sort of confirm what the tech support at the web hosting company already suggested, namely to alter some code in, I believe, htmaccess file in the website itself which will remove the compression the gzip you mention. My concern for the site is not that I was able to fix the problem on my own computer but that people looking for the service offered won't bother any further if the page doesn't load. I'm also hoping that once the search bots have looked at the site that this will become irrelevant.

I'm going back to databases. This web stuff is too complicated...

[stuck]

In my case it was only when someone tweaked the firewall that I could again reach the old Woody's Lounge without first editing the config file. The search bots didn't come into it.

While turning off gzip compression on the server will fix the problem FF can cope with gzip compression so the real fix must be to tweak something else! Just don't ask me!

Ken