I’m reading Steve Souders High Performance Web Sites (2007) and he recommends a whitelist approach to GZIP, and in particular he provides this code:
BrowserMatch ^MSIE [6-9] gzip
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/[5-9] gzip
Is this the complete set of browsers that support GZIP? What about Opera, Safari or Chrome?
Well, just make those browsers lie about their names and they get it, don’t they?
How does BrowserMatch even work? Browsers lie about who they are.
oh you are a mentor now!
The Old Wise Woman of Web Design 
o thththbbbbpp, you know what silly badges mean (someone liked me) : ) I know I haven’t gotten any smarter in the last few months!
Just throwing ideas out. I don’t know what BrowserMatch does. Hopefully looks at more than the user agent string!