These days, web search is becoming an indispensable debugging tool.

A week or so ago, we finally fixed the bug that prevented the Blog Buddy widget from working correctly in IE6.  

This was a challenging issue to debug because the widget worked perfectly on my personal web server but failed on the main jobster.com site.  If not for the web, we might never have found the answer; fortunately a search revealed this post on the MediaCatalyst Blog:

The issue is this: the Flash player in IE6 cannot correctly load (xml) files from web servers that use HTTP compression and no caching. In other words, it does not correctly load any file that returns the following combination of the HTTP response headers:

Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Encoding: deflate

No other browser’s Flash player has this bug, this only occurs in IE6.The problem could only be ‘fixed’ by either disabling HTTP compression, or by removing the no-cache header for this file and user-agent IE6.

I didn’t see the issue on my machine because it wasn’t set up to compress content, whereas our production Apache server was. 

The simplest workaround in our case turned out to be use the “no-store” Cache-Control header rather than “no-cache”.  (Simply removing the no-cache header will not force the browser to refetch the XML feed on each access, which is often not be the desired behavior.)