1016256 - [tarako] Add UA override for timesofindia.com

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Peipei Cheng (needinfo if you need my action)]

timesofindia.indiatimes.com returns desktop site with ffos UA. This blocks Spreadtrums's tests on Tarako. Please help.

Comment 1

[Peipei Cheng (needinfo if you need my action)]

Sorry, the website should be: timesofindia.com

Comment 2

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

Attachment: ua-updates.patch

I rolled in the override for bug 1016259 too.

I had to use an iphone UA for timesofindia.com to prevent it from showing a banner at the top asking to "Install our TOI android app". :(

Comment 3

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

Comment on attachment 8429408 [details] [diff] [review]
ua-updates.patch

We should attempt to contact the site to have this issue fixed locally before adding an UA override. I poked haseeb to attempt contact again in bug 933645.

As well, haseeb seems to be making progress on rediff.com in bug 932846. If he's successful, an override won't be required.

Until these sites are fixed, Tarako tests can be unblocked by following the advice for overriding the UA locally as detailed in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1015045#c12

Comment 4

[Joe Cheng [:jcheng] (please needinfo)]

hi Karl, i wonder if we are already in contact with timesofindia and wonder when things will be changed on the server side? 

we could have until mid June to wait for the server side to change but if it's still not done by mid june, we will need to override to release 

Thanks

Comment 5

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Hi Joe,
Abdul is making efforts, as Lawrence said, and I'm also trying my own connection.

Do you know why the mid-June deadline became pressing?
And what are the criteria we are using for saying Times of India needs UA override.
Just asking because I think we need to have a better understanding on how collectively we decide these things.

Comment 6

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Fabrice,

(In reply to Fabrice Desré [:fabrice] from comment #2)
> I had to use an iphone UA for timesofindia.com to prevent it from showing a
> banner at the top asking to "Install our TOI android app". :(

There is a trade-off here. 
Firefox for Android UA gives the banner (bad for users) but makes tiny spikes in the stats (good for us)
If we do a priority of constituencies: Firefox < Site developers < End Users, maybe the iphone UA is indeed better, even with the associated cost.

Seen you have used:

"Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3"

I wonder what is worse ^_^, check that:

→ http GET http://www.timesofindia.com/ "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; Mobile; rv:30.0) Gecko/30.0 Firefox/30.0"

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 0
Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 23:15:55 GMT
Expires: Thu, 29 May 2014 23:15:55 GMT
Location: http://m.timesofindia.com/
Pragma: no-cache
Server: AkamaiGHost




PS: The patch contains things which are not related to UA override :)

Comment 7

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

I'm clearing the 1.3T nom on this bug. UA overrides are managed separately from device and can be updated at any time. As such, I don't think there is a reason for them to block the release.

Comment 8

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

No sure what you expect from me Karl.. If the simpler iPhone UA works, for sure we should use this one. I don't have time to test that right now.

Comment 9

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

AFAIK Times of India fixed their UA detection so this is no longer required.