True, their server should be returning HTTP/1.0. It's a shame that you can't get away with replacing the initial HTTP/1.0 with HTTP/1 and shave off another coup

True, their server should be returning HTTP/1.0. It's a shame that you can't get away with replacing the initial HTTP/1.0 with HTTP/1 and shave off another couple of bytes :) Edit: I wonder if you could go full retro and just return a HTTP/0.9 response (no HTTP headers at all, just the page contents). If they then put back the DEFLATE/GZIP header bits, perhaps a browser would spot that the contents are compressed and do the decompression...