Symantec Firewall — Problems with Accept-Encoding Headers

Here is a little tidbit that we discovered while trying to debug an issue at work. One of my colleagues found that the Symantec/Norton Personal Firewall/Internet Security mangles the “Accept-Encoding” header sent out by any application — browser, streaming media, etc.
More can be found here.
This is a serious problem, and has a negative effect on Web performance in general, as one of the key methods for improving bandwidth consumption and user performance is Server-Side Compression of as much content as possible.

What the client wants to send:  Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\n
What is sent:                   ---------------: ---- -------\r\n

What is the problem? Is this because Symantec can’t parse compressed content on the fly?

Categories: Uncategorized

2 Comments

  1. Of course.
    They want to look good, so they do not want to incur the cpu cycles involved in decompressing the content.
    BTW, this is not the only thing they mangle.

  2. They want to look good, so they do not want to incur the cpu cycles involved in decompressing the content.BTW, this is not the only thing they mangle.

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