Thursday, May 7, 2009

How to disable GZIP compression in Firefox

Not sure this is the only/best way but I used the following steps to disable gzip compression in Firefox 3.0:

  1. Type about:config in the URL bar (Accept the disclaimer)
  2. Type encoding in the filter field underneath the URL bar
  3. Doubleclick the line network.http.accept-encoding
  4. Enter the following value instead of the default: gzip;q=0,deflate;q=0
Note: See comment from Anonymous below for a possible better way of doing this. Thanks Anonymous!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey
Why you want to disable GZip compression ? Isn't it a bandwidth optimization technique ?

Sylvain said...

It is but it can be useful to disable for network troubleshooting purposes, if one wants to make a network capture of the HTTP response for instance. Sure not something you'll leave disabled permanently.

Anonymous said...

This will not work in all cases. Some intermediate proxies don't accept anything other than "gzip, deflate". They just ignore the quality setting (q=0). If you want to disable gzip-encoding entirely in firefox, go to about:config and just delete any value assigned to network.http.accept-encoding so no Accept-Encoding header is sent by the browser.

Anonymous said...

you made my day!
for no reason one of my websites wouldn't display in those devices whom not support gz compress! like Opera mini on Nokia phones!

i just disabled my firefox gz via your guide, and finally i could debug the problem!

guess what was the problem!

the function gzdecode does not exists in my php!
i used of an alternative to gzdecode the contents for those devices whom not support gz...

tnx

Tim Pizey said...

Thanks, this was what I needed, however note that google and twitter, the first two that I tried, ignored my preferences!

Anonymous said...

Thanks bro, it definetly helped.

Anonymous said...

Well, I am working on a little http client... It seems that some proxies still return compressed content even if client sends no "Accept-Encoding:" header. Setting to empty value didn't help either...

Tim Pizey said...

Yay! Again you come to the rescue, I having forgotten since last time I found your site!

Trade Log said...

you made my day. thanks a lot.