For reasons that don’t matter in the least I needed, yes, really and truly needed, to open a mediawiki-driven site in Safari and when I tried to do so, I was greeted by an unsightly error calling itself “NSURLErrorDomain: -1015″ that complained “cannot decode raw data”.
Ouch.
Searching Google, I found nothing useful except for this thread on the Apple support forums where amongst the dozens of rightfully irate screamers there were two that suggested gzip compression on the web server was to blame (well, not really to blame, of course. every single browser in the world is absolutely fine with gzip compression except for Safari, so by rights it’s Safari that’s to blame and not the compression, but you get the point). And luckily the mediawiki site in question was running on my own server, so I could disable the offending gzip compression quite easily. Of course I couldn’t remember ever having turned on gzip compression, but after some grepping I managed to unearth the following foul, foul line in in includes/DefaultSettings.php:
$wgDisableOutputCompression = false;
Added a line to LocalSettings.php that explicitly set it to “true” and presto, Safari displayed the website without any problems at all and I was once again the happy and fulfilled little tinkerer I usually am.
The question, of course, is why Apple thinks it can pass off a browser as “just working” that chokes so violently on something as common as server side gzip encoding. Especially in the mobile browsing market that they’re so interested in acquiring a substantial share of and where megabytes transferred are quite literally worth their weight in gold.