Dear Apache Software Foundation, and the developers of the Apache Web server:

I would like to thank you for developing a great product. I rely on it daily to host my own sites, and a large number of people on the Internet seem to share my love of this software.

However, it appears that you seem to want to maintain a simple flaw in your logic that continues to make me crazy. I am a Web performance analyst, and at least once a week I sigh, and shake my head whenever I stoop to use Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) to visit secure sites.

I seems that in your SSL configurations, you continue to assume that ALL versions of MSIE can’t handle persistent connections under SSL/TLS.
Is this true? Is a bug initially caught in MSIE 5.x (5.0??) still valid for MSIE 6.0/7.0?

The short answer is: I don’t know.

It seems that no one in the Apache server team has bothered to go back and see if the current versions of MSIE — we are trying to track down the last three people use MSIE 5.x and help them — still share this problem.

In the meantime, can you change your SSL exclusion RegEx to something more, relevant for 2007?

Current RegEx:
SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive
	ssl-unclean-shutdown
	downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
Relvant, updated REGEX:
SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE [1-5].*"
	nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown
	downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE [6-9].*"
	ssl-unclean-shutdown

Please? PLEASE? It’s so easy…and would solve so many performance problems…

Please?

Thank you.