A little inspection showed that the CSS files I stored on S3 were not being served with a Content-Type header, while from a standard apache web server they were. This combined with the new strictness of Chrome 2 (actually resulting from a new strictness in WebKit) made Chrome not treat these files as actual CSS, and break the page.

So the obvious solution was to make the CSS files be delivered from S3 with the correct “Content-Type: text/css” header. Fortunately enough, this is very easy to do with S3 API. Just pass the “Content-Type:text/css” header when you’re uploading the file to S3, and it will be present in the response headers whenever someone requests the file.

Here’s to the browser wars, that never end and got more complicated with the new player in town, Google Chrome.