Update : Thanks to Paul Robertson for pointing out that as of AIR 2.0.2 released a couple of weeks back, there is native cross platform GZIP support in Air. However, if you need to achieve this in the 1.5 runtime for any reason, the below is still applicable!

To reduce bandwidth many servers compress HTTP responses using GZIP encoding. Pretty much all web browsers support GZIP decoding, so the actual data transfered is a fraction of the final unpacked response. Flex/Flash apps running in a web browser can take advantage of this as the browser handles the HTTP responses.

However, Flex AIR apps which do not run in a browser don’t have this luxury. By default, the headers sent in a request from AIR do not accept GZIP encoding, and even if they did, Flex / AIR runtime has no idea how to handle GZIP de-compression!!

Thanks to the Flex community however, it is possible!
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