Home / server / Questions / 212671
Accepted
Sam
Asked: 2010-12-15 15:25:58 +0800 CST

Whats the use of BrowserMatch or Options All in .htaccess?

  • 772

I found these somewhere at the end of my htaccess file, from a time in history where I was in a mood of just adding as much as i could to my htaccess, now wishing the opposite: to remove everything thats unneeded from it, to make my site faster.

Q1 Whats the function of these?
Q2 Will my site become faster if i would delete these?

Options All
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteBase /

BrowserMatch "MSIE" brokenvary=1
BrowserMatch "Mozilla/4.[0-9]{2}" brokenvary=1
BrowserMatch "Opera" !brokenvary
SetEnvIf brokenvary 1 force-no-vary[/i]
performance apache-2.2 .htaccess

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    Options All
Options +FollowSymLinks

    The Options tag specifies which features are available in a directory. In this case, it allows everything, but in case that doesn't do it, it's extra permitting following symlinks.

    RewriteBase /

    The RewriteBase tag is part of mod_rewrite and sets the root of later rewrite rules. This is completely superfluous.

    BrowserMatch "MSIE" brokenvary=1
BrowserMatch "Mozilla/4.[0-9]{2}" brokenvary=1
BrowserMatch "Opera" !brokenvary

    BrowserMatch is used to change behavior based on the user-agent string. It sets environmental variables that Apache uses. In this case it's working around some (old) broken HTTP/1.1 problems that IE and browsers that send an agent string with "Mozilla/4.xy" had. The last line tells the webserver that Opera behaves as expected, and to unset the environmental variable if it is present.

    • 4