title: is AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 in .htaccess safe?
body: <p>Very long story, but I had a problem with my site, where there would be a blank white page flashed between any page/link navigation within my site.  Only happened in Firefox, and only in newer versions of Firefox (e.g. didn't show up in version 3.6.x).</p>
  
  <p>After comparing response headers from two different servers, the site being served from the other server was not having this problem -- I noticed that its response header had this in it:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Content-Type text/html; charset=UTF-8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My normal server which did have the problem had this in its response header:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Content-type text/html
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So, I added this line to my .htaccess and the problem went away:</p>
  
  <pre><code>AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>What is it about Content-Type not having charset specified that could possibly cause Firefox to flash (like 10 millisecond) total blank white screen between pages in my site?</p></li>
  <li><p>Now that I fixed the problem, is my fix "ok"?  Is it safe, or does it have some high probability of breaking something else?  </p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>My quick testing didn't show a problem, but not know knowing what side effects it could cause, or the reason why it fixed my page-flashing problem, bothers me.</p>