I think it is browser-dependant whether gzip decompression is performed after all data is received. Here is a quote from the Mozilla site, at
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/apache/gzip/ "The current Mozilla source already sends Accept-encoding: gzip and can do a streaming decompression of HTML data received with Content-encoding: gzip." gzip compression is inherently stream-oriented, so the decompression can/should be stream-oriented as well. One effect you may be seeing is that if you have a web page with unconstrained tables, the browser will have to download the entire page, decompress it, and layout the entire table before anything can be displayed. This happens with or without gzip. But if you are on a very slow client omputer and have a fast connection, the gzip time could outweigh the uncompressed data transfer time and make the page display slower. I don't know whether MSIE decompresses on-the-fly or waits until all data is downloaded. Jim > > Has anyone investigated gzip transport encoding at all? > > I played around with the rlreturnz stuff and it's nice and it works, > but my main problem with gzip encoded content is that the browser waits > until it's downloaded the entire file before it decompresses the data > and begins rendering the page. A side-effect is that it makes pages > appear to take longer to load, even though they take less time to > download. Of course it depends on the content that was compressed in > the first place, but for HTML pages it's a noticeable difference, which > is why I never adopted the use of the gzip content encoding. > > The other possibility I read about was using gzip for HTTP transfer > encoding. So at the protocol level it would compress and stream the > data (I believe...). I assume this would be pretty much transparent to > the generation of HTML (or any other content) and stuffing it down the > pipe and then the browser decompressing and rendering the page as it > did before (without the noticeable delay). > > I have no idea what, if any, web browsers support this yet. > > Anyone got a clue or two they can share about this? > > - Gabriel >
