Created: 14 Feb 2006
Alan, here’s why I advise against using Norton products.
At work, we have a series of websites which contain many large pages of HTML. Many of the visitors to the website are also using low bandwidth Internet connections and their experience no doubt suffers because of this. Happily, there is a neat technical solution to this problem, which also should enable us to make a saving on our bandwidth charges, which are huge, because we serve a lot of pages. As part of the HTTP procotol, it is possible to use compression, thus speeding up the loading of pages for those on slow connections.
Unhappily, we are unable to use HTTP compression, because some of our users have Norton Internet Security installed on their machines. It appears that older versions of this product do not interact well with Apache’s mod_deflate, causing problems such as extremely slow page loads. Unfortunately, we never managed to work out how to identify Norton users so we could disable compressing their content. For the sake of this group of people we were forced to go back to uncompressed HTTP and literally millions of people suffer longer page load times than they need to.