Windows now widely uses .msi files for installable programs. The extension .msi is not known in the default mime.types file. Suggestion: add msi in the list of application/octet-stream recognised file extensions so that the default behaviour is to serve these files as application/octet-stream.
Other file types that should be sent as application/octet-stream instead of text/plain include .wmv and .rar files. Or we could just fix bug 13986 and all files with unknown extensions would be sent without a Content-Type.
Further research at the MozillaZine forums has shown that these six extensions cause the most MIME type problems: wmv, wma, asx, asf, rar, dmg. According to filext.com these seem to be the most appropriate MIME types for these extensions: wmv video/x-ms-wmv wma audio/x-ms-wma asx video/x-ms-asf asf video/x-ms-asf rar application/octet-stream dmg application/octet-stream msi application/octet-stream
The more appropriate mime-type for .rar is application/x-rar-compressed, but see bug 8633.
Hmmm... so according to Apache policy, we can add the rar, dmg, and msi extensions as application/octet-stream, but we can't add wmv, wma, asf, or asx because they don't have IANA registered MIME types?
The MSDN lists the following : http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwmt/html/mime.asp .asf video/x-ms-asf .asx video/x-ms-asf .wma audio/x-ms-wma .wax audio/x-ms-wax .wmv video/x-ms-wmv .wvx video/x-ms-wvx .wm video/x-ms-wm .wmx video/x-ms-wmx .wmz application/x-ms-wmz .wmd application/x-ms-wmd Not listing those files in the default apache (both 1.x and 2.x) configuration files leads to a lot of problems with standard-compliant browsers like Mozilla because Mozilla innocently believes what's sent in http-header. Because MS IE doesn't adhere to the HTTP standard (that http header has the ultimate authority in the type determination) and relies on 'MIME type sniffing' and file extensions, a number of ignorant web masters fail to add them. What I'm writting here isn't likely to convince Apache developers to add non-IANA-registered MIME types however widely they may be used. So, I'm now thinkining as to how to add them to the IANA registry.
We will not be adding x- content types to our configuration. If they are registered in IANA, then we will do it.
I guess that's a rational approach. Would it be helpful to Apache administrators to include in the documentation some comments about the MSDN list of extension file types? There are probably a lot of Windows-hosted servers affected by this, and IMHO it would help administrators to have a convenient list of items to add (probably by adding AddType statements rather than by editing the mime.types files themselves).
There's already been some work done on listing common file extensions that are often misconfigured in Apache at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183340