Browser support for RFC 3749

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RFC 3749 defines a mechanism for compressing a TLS connection using the DEFLATE compression mechanism. When used in conjunction with https, this fills a similar role to that of Content-Encoding: gzip, except that headers benefit from compression too (as the whole connection is compressed), and I suspect there is less chance of weird proxy / caching bugs. I decided to do some quick tests to see which browsers actually support this, as I found approximately zero information on the subject on the internet; the results, unfortunately, are rather dismal and depressing:

  • Chrome: supported (apparently since Chrome 9, but I only tested Chrome 15 on the dev channel)
  • Firefox: not supported (tested 8.0 Aurora)
  • Safari: not supported
  • Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7: not supported
  • Android 2.3 default browser: not supported
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