Browse loses on comcast.net

[jg]

Visit www.comcast.net. Notice you lose completely.

It appears, in a very obnoxious way that comcast is trying to do some animation of telling you to upgrade the browser.

a) comcast.net is broken that it doesn't tolerate some browser strings. b) I'm glad they are trying to get people to upgrade their browser, some will use firefox. But... they do it in a horrid way.... c) we need some way to set the browser string, or for if other ISP's do likewise, we may not even be able to get internet connectivity. d) this could be a support nightmare for g1g1 (I wanted to get to comcast.net to read my mail, and comcast is one of the U.S.'s biggest ISP's.

[marco]

It seem to work fine in epiphany to me. Maybe something with our UA... will have to investigate.

[marco]

Simon, Jim, can you update on this one? I've seen discussion about it in irc.

[jg]

heh. Comcast loses, misinterprets the user agent string, and you end up with a blank page (that is reloading, eating your machine entirely).

Comcast is a major U.S. ISP; so this one is a real headache for G1G1 folks.

Note that this is the page you'd go to to log in to get your web mail....

The question is if we should redo our browser string in some fashion....

Or have a way to set it explicitly.

As it is such an issue for G1G1, I'm putting it back to blocker....

[marco]

epiphany has this on Fedora:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/20080528 Fedora/2.22.2-3.fc9 Epiphany/2.22 Firefox/3.0

And it works with comcast. We should compare it with Browse one and see why we lose.

[jg]

We currently have:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586, en-US, rv:1.9) Gecko OLPC/Update.1 (XO)

Betcha the lack of Firefox/3 is doing it....

[erikos]

We need to add the following line to prefs.js to make comcast work - epiphany is doing the same.

pref("general.useragent.extra.firefox", "Firefox/3.0.1");

[erikos]

Epiphany is using as well a string to distinct the epiphany version.

• pref("general.useragent.extra.epiphany", "Epiphany/2.0.1");

We could do the same for hulahop - not sure we need it though.

[marco]

I'd do both. It's nice for statistics.

[marco]

Please provide a testcase.

[marco]

Actually, it would be better to not hardcode the version number. We can talk about it later an see if we can autogenerate it.

[marco]

Firefox version can't be figured out dinamically. So I suggest to add the Firefox bit as an hardcoded pref and to just skip the extra.epiphany for now (not necessary to fix this issue). r+ on that

[erikos]

|TestCase|

open browse and load the page comcast.net; the page should be able to load

[erikos]

Tested in joyride-2228 as working.