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3
Jun
2008

Getting a “Content Encoding Error” message in Firefox?

Categories: Software

I, and others, have been getting a “Content Encoding Error” message with the text “The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression” in Firefox 3 (beta versions and RC1).

I didn’t investigate the cause, but a simple workaround is to disable the Firefox cache and re-visit the site. Not ideal, but it’ll get you by.

15 Responses:

Noah Sun, 15th Jun, 2008 6:00 pm :

Bug 366023 – Content Encoding Error
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366023

seems to be hot on the trail of this problem. There’s a patch that says fixes it but it won’t be able to make Firefox 3 w/o more testing and investigation.
cgarvey Sun, 15th Jun, 2008 6:10 pm :

Thanks for the pointer!
TechnoLaziness Tue, 17th Jun, 2008 5:26 pm :

hi. After getting the problem in firefox rc1, I immediately tried opening up the same page( a wiki article) in Opera, and all I could see were encoded symbols in opera as well. Any clue? I can’t get where the problem actually lies?
Freiddie Fri, 20th Jun, 2008 2:53 am :

Here’s an easier way to do this:
Ctrl+F5.
It’s the same idea as yours, since Ctrl+F5 forces to reload without cache.

Thanks for the post (without it I wouldn’t have thought of this either)!
cgarvey Fri, 20th Jun, 2008 8:08 am :

Worth a try, but it didn’t work for me. Nor did a browser restart.
problem with search Thu, 26th Jun, 2008 9:29 am :

[...] There are a couple of suggested workarounds here: Getting a "Content Encoding Error" message in Firefox? | CGarvey’s Blog [...]
Bill Thu, 10th Jul, 2008 12:01 am :

The ctrl + F5 worked for me
Mark Sun, 21st Dec, 2008 2:09 am :

When I have this problem, IE will read the page. Ctrl + F5 works for me too.
Erik Fri, 6th Feb, 2009 12:49 am :

After installing 3.0.6 I ran into this problem. Clearing cache doesn’t work for me. I have to use IE.
brian Mon, 20th Apr, 2009 8:08 pm :

i’m having ‘content encoding error’ on FF and ‘IE cannot display the webpage’ in IE.
does anyone know how to solve this?
greg Thu, 4th Jun, 2009 1:21 pm :

my laptop has same problem,
but i’ve install avast antivirus and avast found some infected file in windir\system32\ it was called btscs or something like that. after i removed this file evetything firefox and ie start working
Kaida Wed, 8th Jul, 2009 11:33 pm :

Thank you Freiddie!!
Matthew Fedak Mon, 11th Jan, 2010 10:51 am :

I just had same problem 5 mins ago, I am a php developer in Leicester, UK and it was happening because I had a php script with some whitespace before the opening <?php tag. I removed and suddenly it worked again in explorer 8 and firefox 3.5.7!
Brian Tate Sat, 14th Aug, 2010 8:57 pm :

I finally figured out, after many many hours of trial and error, and narrowed MY cause of this problem down to the fact that I run NetLimiter Lite 2.10.0 on my computer to shape my incoming traffic, so that I can still surf while I’m downloading. I found that when I disabled it, I didn’t have any problems whatsoever, and when I re-enable it, problems come back. So I’m updating to 2.11.0 and hoping that will fix the problem. Good luck!
satya Sun, 28th Nov, 2010 2:01 pm :

in my case, the error was caused by this line of code:
ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”);