The response from Stack Exchange is always compressed, as indicated by Glorfindel.

If you inspect the responseHeader "Content-Encoding" after you called `send` like so:

    MsgBox xh.getResponseHeader("Content-Encoding")
You will see `gzip` as an answer.

You can indicate to the server with a RequestHeader Accept-Encoding what encoding/compression you support. Add this line before the `send` method:

    xh.setRequestHeader "Accept-Encoding", "deflate;q=1.0"

and you'll get