Signed up for an account with Vanguard – got one of the automatic confirmation emails. It gives the url for signing up for online access (I tried to during the account sign-up and it failed)
http://www.vanguard.com/visit/onlineaccess
Nice, simple page to do a redirect (via a meta tag, a 302 would be nicer). The major issue is the content-type is being sent as text/plain.
Firefox happily served up the page contents as text. IE interpreted it and took the redirect. This is one of those situations where Firefox is doing the more spec-correct thing, but IE is (admittedly, arguably out of spec for how to handle text/plain) doing what the end-user really wants, and living with a busted server that’s sending up a wrong Content-Type. I’m a little conflicted as to which behavior I’d rather have in my browser, but it’s an interesting comparison nonetheless.
No file extension, so this isn’t a “interpret based on file extension instead of content type” issue, I’d imagine, at least not on first glance. 
Here’s the email I sent them via their secure email form thingy. I wonder what the odds are that it’ll actually get to the right group and fixed?
I got an email from Vanguard after signing up for an account that mentioned enabling online account access and gave a url of
http://www.vanguard.com/visit/onlineaccess
However, when that page is hit, the web server is responding with a Content-type header of text/plain, so many browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, etc.) will not interpret the response body as html and will instead just display it as text. Internet Explorer still interprets it as html, so the common case is still working, but it would be nice if the Content-type for this page could be fixed so other browsers could have this page (which does nothing more than a redirect via the meta refresh tag anyway, seems kind of silly not to have the url send a 302 redirect instead) work correctly.
Here’s a quick wget | grep to show the issue:
% wget -S http://www.vanguard.com/visit/onlineaccess 2>&1 | grep -i content-type
5 Content-type: text/plain
