Browsers & redirection

[apprentice]

I had initially setup a 301 from a domain A -> B. I had also placed redirects from non-www -> www-enabled for both domains. Tested all possible cases on FF and I was left assured that the redirects work fine. Having recently installed IE7b3 I tried typing example.com but to my surprise it didn't redirect to www.example.com as it happens when I do with FF. I tried with Opera 9 and like IE it also didn't redirect. Is there any known difference in regard with redirects - is IE and Opera block redirects as far as the www vs. non-www version of a site is concerned? Or is it just FF that is 'cleverer' by retrying with the www prefix if the non-www doesn't work?

A parenthesis here; IE7b3 looked nice indeed - head and shoulders compared to IE6 as far as CSS rendering is concerned (I decided I couldn't wait for the final built so gave b3 a go). Look and feel of the fonts also stands out and makes text much more clear to read compared to the very 'thin' rendering IE6 used to do. The only thing that didn't work for me was the 'auto' that aligned the 800x600-optimised site in the centre of the screen. The new IE seems to ignore that and uses the default left align. I am surprised - is IE started to show some appreciation towards the CSS standard specs that were only used so far by other browsers?

Regards

[kaled]

The change in font rendering in IE7 is due entirely to clear-type font smoothing. You can switch this on for your whole computer and all true-type fonts will be smoothed in all applications (XP only).

Sorry, can't help with other issues.

Kaled.

[encyclo]

How exactly are you doing the 301 redirect? Via .htaccess? If so, the browser used will make no difference as the redirect is done by the server.

You can use the "Live HTTP headers" extension in Firefox to see exactly what the server response codes are.

[apprentice]

Thank you for the responses.

Although I am not 100% sure, I don't think its done using htaccess. I had to contact my webhost to arrange setting up the 301 and when they did set it up I couldn't find the htaccess file. I asked how they did it, but it seems this is something that I might not have access to. Maybe they hide some functionality to prevent people from screwing up their server settings. I am not sure, but they might have done that using httpd.conf (?) since I cannot see that file either. Well, that doesn't affect me terribly as this is not the primary domain for the website. I just decided to reserve it for avoiding any implications in the future from people using it.

Regards.