X-Pad: avoid browser bug

If you're looking for an explanation to this "X-Pad: avoid browser bug" header you should feel lucky. The X-Pad header is a work around Apache uses for a bug in really old versions of Netscape and it only shows up if there's a chance the 256th or 257th byte of a response is a newline.

It's a junk header, all it does is prevent the 256th and 257th byte of the response from being a newline. If Apache didn't do this, old versions of Netscape would hang.

It's a wonder why this is still part of Apache, we're talking really old versions of Netscape here.

IE8: Intranet Always in Compatibility Mode

I was having some odd problems with websites on my local intranet and eventually I traced it back to the sites being forced into IE7 Compatibility Mode for some odd reason. I could view the exact same page on a remote server and it would act as expected.

The culprit, was a little setting in the IE8 Tools menu called Compatibility View Settings, more specifically it was a checkbox in the resulting dialog labeled "Display local intranet sites in compibility view" that was automatically forcing every page on every server in my local intranet to automatically use compatibility mode without even displaying the broken page icon in the address bar.