HTTP Download
My web host doesn't allow anonymous ftp, and early versions of MSIE don't properly handle password encoded URLs (e.g. ftp://Username:[email protected]/filename.exe). So I've resorted to using http for software downloads from my web site (e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/filename.exe). This seems to work ok for some users, but fails for others. In all cases the file appears to download correctly, however for some users the downloaded exe file is corrupted, and can not be installed.
Is anyone aware of issues associated with browser based HTTP software (binary) downloads? MSIE seems to do error correction even when using HTTP. Does anyone know whether this is true for other browsers, such as Netscape and early versions of AOL? (The download program file size is 4.6MB and I'm using Win Zip Self-Extractor.)
Thanks for your input,
Jim
Busy posted this at 05:57 — 5th April 2002.
He has: 6,151 posts
Joined: May 2001
have you tried just zipping it (.zip) maybe its your version of winzip vs their version, I'm pretty sure they are all the same but have seen some changes over winzips versions.
the .exe could be trying to run instead of downloading as well, or users chosing to run from source rather than save to disk (friend of mine who just got a pc did that as he didnt have a "disk", so once i explained the "disk" was the puter he was ok)
dk01 posted this at 00:26 — 7th April 2002.
He has: 516 posts
Joined: Mar 2002
Just thought I might say that until I upgraded my MSIE to version 5.5 I used to get broken downloads all the time for a variety of sites. I think it has to do with the browser not completely saving the files once it is finished. I don't think you can fix this by changing where you place the file or encoding. I may be wrong but this has been my experience.
-dk
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