Good question. It's definitly worth investigating.
What are we talking about here --- some hack to make users' web browsers
decompress pages on-the-fly? How much does that slow down the browsing
experience, if you've got an old slow PC? (I can believe that if you've
got a fast PC and a slow internet connection, it could make things
faster overall ... but the breakeven point is not obvious.) What are
the odds that people using older browsers will be locked out entirely?
regards, tom lane
Oh, and there is no chance that older browsers are locked out,
mod_deflate and mod_gzip (gzip is the apache 1.3 module, deflate is for
apache 2) both only compress if they find that the browser supports it.
That being said, gzipped content was supported by browsers since the
netscape 3 days.