Compare to the disaster of IE which sometimes looks at the file extension to decide how to display the document - that caused me huge problems way back. Agreei

Compare to the disaster of IE which sometimes looks at the file extension to decide how to display the document - that caused me huge problems way back. Agreeing with most of your post, I think you are wrong on this one. IE will do lots of stuff to detemine what kind of data it is actually getting from the server, somewhat overriding the http spec. Even if something is served as a appliction/octet-stream, IE might resort to looking at the extension of the URL (or the content-disposition header, if one is present). If these checks fails, it will resort to MIME sniffing, by analyzing the first 256 bytes of the file to see if it can figure out what kind of content it contains. This method is surprisingly accurate, and you can test it yourself. [1] In my opinion IE does a lot of things to make life easier for it's users to overcome problems caused by people configuring their servers incorrectly, something which is getting increasingly common. I don't think IE deserves to be ridiculed over this extra effort. [1] For some demo-code you can try out, check the following link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58510?sort=oldest#sort-top http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58510?sort=oldest#sort-to...