I use Amazon S3 for cloud storage of big digital-cinema files (up to 3GB) for distribution. It works fine most of the time, but I kept getting the odd complaint: “I can’t download on my PC, I get an error”. Everytime I asked what browser they were using, it was Internet Explorer. I am a Google Chrome man, and I almost never do anything with IE, but still, customer is king, let’s see what could be wrong. So I tested it myself with IE and yes, most files can be downloaded, but some couldn’t. Sometimes one would get an empty page, sometimes the following: “XML 5619: Incorrect document syntax”
So I fire up Fiddler2 – an invaluable tool to see what’s going on under the hood of the communication between your web browser and the web server. I look at the client and server HTTP headers and see something interesting:
1) Download via Chrome
CLIENT:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.122 Safari/534.30
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
SERVER:
Content-Type: binary/octet-stream
Content-Length: 26176425
Server: AmazonS3
2) Download via IE for a file that can be downloaded:
CLIENT:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
SERVER:
Content-Type: binary/octet-stream
Content-Length: 26176425
Server: AmazonS3
3) Download via IE for a file that can NOT be downloaded:
CLIENT:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
SERVER:
Content-Type: application/x-zip-compressed
Content-Length: 687411306
Server: AmazonS3
It was a consistent pattern: every time the Content-Type of a file was x-zip-compressed, I couldn’t download . It might have something to do with MS KB 841120: the server that recompresses .zip files with gzip, and the browser mis-interpreting.
Anyway, I used CloudBerry S3 Explorer to go and explicitly change every file’s HTTP headers and now I can download all files with IE. If I ever forget about this IE quirk, now I’ve written down the solution!
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