Going beyond gzipping - Is it still relevent these days?

[Avi Keinan]

Steve souders wrote a chapter in his book (Even faster websites, chapter 9) about old softwares (like ZoneAlarm, Mcafee and norton internet security) that strip 'Accept-Encoding: gzip' header,

You can read more about it here


Since this book was published more then 3 years ago, I decided to check if this chapter is still relevent to these days,

For this check, I wrote a simple script and saved it as gzip.js (loaded async) in one of my clients website(Hebrew website for Israeli visitors), after a week, here are the results:

Total requests: 31,107.
Requests without 'Accept-Encoding: gzip': 369.

In 2009, the requests without accept encoding wer'e about 10% of the total request, Now, in 2012, it's only 1.18%.

I wonder what kind of software this 1.18% used (users in Israel use ADSL-NGN/Cable, almost nobody use proxy).

Avi Keinan

[sajal]

You can even log the "Accept-Encoding" request header in your access logs... that way you can easily investigate the 1.18% ... you can use other fields in the log to see the users isp (from ip) . browser/os (user agent) ...

i guess the 1.18% is mostly bots and/or ancient browsers...