IE tries to download a file instead of opening a page with gzip

Enable 301 redirect to www site in your htaccess file

# Various rewrite rules.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on

  # If your site can be accessed both with and without the 'www.' prefix, you
  # can use one of the following settings to redirect users to your preferred
  # URL, either WITH or WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix. Choose ONLY one option:
  #
  # To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
  # (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
  # adapt and uncomment the following:
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The last 2 lines need to be uncommented in the htaccess file. Replace example and com with your site name.

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^drupal\.org$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.drupal.org/$1 [L,R=301]

OR

try this for your boost rules... ps what's the date for boost? below is for the latest dev.

  ### BOOST START ###
  <FilesMatch "(\.html\.gz|\.html)$">
    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
      Header set Expires "Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT"
      Header set Cache-Control "no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0"
    </IfModule>
  </FilesMatch>
  <IfModule mod_mime.c>
    AddCharset utf-8 \.html
    AddCharset utf-8 \.xml
  </IfModule>
  AddEncoding x-gzip \.gz
  <FilesMatch "\.html\.gz$">
    ForceType text/html
  </FilesMatch>
  <FilesMatch "\.xml\.gz$">
    ForceType text/xml
  </FilesMatch>

  # Skip boost IF not get request OR uri has wrong dir OR cookie is set
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^GET$ [OR]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (^/(admin|cache|misc|modules|sites|system|themes))|(/(comment/reply|user|user/(login|password|register))$) [OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} DRUPAL_UID
  RewriteRule .* - [S=4]

  # GZIP
  RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/cache/gz/%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}_%{QUERY_STRING}\.html\.gz -s
  RewriteRule .* cache/gz/%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}_%{QUERY_STRING}\.html\.gz [L,T=text/html]
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/cache/gz/%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}_%{QUERY_STRING}\.xml\.gz -s
  RewriteRule .* cache/gz/%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}_%{QUERY_STRING}\.xml\.gz [L,T=text/xml]

  # NORMAL
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/cache/%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}_%{QUERY_STRING}\.html -s
  RewriteRule .* cache/%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}_%{QUERY_STRING}\.html [L,T=text/html]
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/cache/%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}_%{QUERY_STRING}\.xml -s
  RewriteRule .* cache/%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}_%{QUERY_STRING}\.xml [L,T=text/xml]
  ### BOOST END ###

key part is [L,T=text/html]

EDIT: Updated this code block. its in the latest dev (june 13th) with these changes.

what's your apache version? I've noticed some differences between apache versions in regards to this issue. Sadly an older version of apache worked correctly and it was the newer version that screwed up.

ps changed the above boost htaccess code.

If it opens the file in the browser then AddEncoding x-gzip \.gz is not getting set correctly for some reason. Can you check that it's in your htaccess file? You can check your php version by running this in a php code block.

  echo $_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'];

Should output something like Apache/2.2.11 DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8i PHP/5.2.9

Latest dev, gzip is controlled by the Page compression setting. Click Disable to disable boost's gzip.

Please provide feedback

AddEncoding x-gzip \.gz

changed to

AddEncoding x-gzip .gz

I was having similar issues to the above, and found that changing

AddEncoding x-gzip .gz

to

AddEncoding gzip .gz

fixed the issue for me. This may well be an issue that crops up again.

@sdrycroft
What version of apache are you running? what version of IE did you test it on?

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_mime.html#addencoding

To make this long story short, you should always use x-gzip and x-compress for these two specific encodings.

Apache 2.2 (RHEL5), and IE8.

Headers [working]

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-gb
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache
Cookie: ********


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:40:57 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Last-Modified: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:05:59 GMT
ETag: "310357-13ca-46febf702dbc0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 5066
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Keep-Alive: timeout=3, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: gzip

Headers [Broken]

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-gb
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache
Cookie: ********


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:45:55 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Last-Modified: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:05:59 GMT
ETag: "310357-13ca-46febf702dbc0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 5066
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Keep-Alive: timeout=3, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: x-gzip

That version of apache is messed up for some reason. It's supposed to return gzip even though it's set to x-gzip. Just confirmed via wireshark & IE8 with apache 1.3 (shared hosting) & 2.2.3 (Red Hat).

Here's the headers I get using IE8 & the default boost settings.

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: ***
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:18:40 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Last-Modified: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:17:26 GMT
ETag: "bf9d48-16a8-ab5b5d80"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 5800
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: gzip

Bug your host, they messed up somewhere.

I will say this though, if using this trick then you have to set it to gzip
#528506: Better Detect GZIP Compression

It could also be an issue with a firewall, as those have been known to mess up content-encoding headers... going to switch this back to active, as I don't know of any browsers the send x-gzip. So I believe the current recommendation on the apache site is now outdated.

moving to #546850: Next round of .htaccess changes. Getting these "perfect" is the goal.

Thanks for your time mikeytown2. I'll look into this further at some point (I'm the host, so I'll have to bug myself).