Safari doesn't always like bz2 compressed DMG files

I noticed something weird this morning about the recent SimpleDockThis link is dead and no longer works. project I released last night. The DMG is compressed using bz2 rather than the default zlib compression used by default when creating compressed disk images.

Turns out Safari gets confused and guesses wrong a lot of the time with bz2 compressed disk images, and renames the downloaded file to file.dmg.bz2 when the server doesn’t give a DMG specific MIME type. The end result is that you have to remove the .bz2 extension at the end or the file will be unusable. For that you actually have to know of this issue tho, which not all end-users do.

This problem is easily fixed however if you use Apache by simply adding the following to your .htaccess file:

AddType application/x-apple-diskimage .dmg

With this fixed, i still decided to upload a new copy of SimpleDock which is compressed with zlib instead of bz2, simply cause the size difference was 14.23 KB, and Safari doesn’t have any problems with zlib compressed disk images regardless of MIME types. And also cause I wanted to make a minor change to the uninstall info file :)

The only strange thing though is that the SimpleDock download worked fine last night when i tested it, but this morning when I was testing some other stuff, I noticed it didn’t work properly anymore.

But oh well, it’s all fixed and working now, and I don’t feel like doing any P.I. work today… lol