HTTP Compression -- Any potential issues with doing this?

[MWM3772]

We are thinking about turning on the IIS-6 HTTP Compression to help with page load times.   Has anyone had any issues with doing this, particularly from an SEO or site functionality standpoint?     We just want to double check before we take this step and see if there are any potential pitfalls we may not be aware of.  Everything we've read seems to indicate it can only yield positive results.

Any thoughts, advice, comments would be appreciated.

Thank-you,

Matt & Keith

[MWM3772]

Thanks.

[MWM3772]

Thanks.

[john4math]

I am aware that IE6 is old and many sites have dropped support for it. It's usage will vary by market. If the fix required 10 minutes of your time, you wouldn't do that for 1% or more of your potential customers?

If you have any Chinese users for instance, you'd want to make it work. Or if you're targeting people who are less tech-savvy or older in age, your IE6 usage numbers are bound to be higher. I agree that for most sites, it's probably not a huge issue. Since I experienced it on our site, I thought I'd mention it. If there is an issue, there is also likely a published fix that would require minimal effort.

[Highland]

You do realize that Microsoft has been trying to kill IE6 off, and just recently celebrated IE6 usage in the US dropping below 1%, right?

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

I wouldn't consider IE6 in your business plans.

[john4math]

Once you implement it, I'd check is that Internet Explorer 6 likes it.  I can't remember the details, but when we added compression on our site, there were instances where IE6 didn't like it.

[Highland]

According to Google's Webmaster blog, Googlebot supports gzip and deflate

Googlebot:  Sure. All major search engines and web browsers support gzip compression for content to save bandwidth. Other entries that you might see here include "x-gzip" (the same as "gzip"), "deflate" (which we also support), and "identity" (none).An incompatible compression would be the only downside to turning on compression.