104733 - msn.com - MSN.com site looks really really bad

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect, P1)

Description

[Joe Infla]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.4+) Gecko/20011008
BuildID:    2001100803

A beta preview of MSN.com's new site design won't render in Mozilla.  Instead,
it says "Attention: Web Browser Upgrade Required to View MSN.com", and offers to
let you download free IE versions.  Can this be worked around?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Open Mozilla
2.  navigate to included url (http://beta.msn.com)


Actual Results:  Get short page requesting use of Internet Explorer for proper
viewing.

Expected Results:  Get new site redesign of MSN.com, as viewable in Internet
Explorer.

Comment 1

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

p1, all/all, confirming. Site looks ok if I use the UA toolbar on it

Comment 2

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

They are not blocking NS6.x so this looks like a pretty good evangelism issue.
We will see whom we can contact.

Comment 3

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

Good Morning,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft.
 
I understand you would like assistance with Mozilla. This product is not
actually a Microsoft product, so we may be unable to assist you with 
this. Since our Support Professionals are not trained to troubleshoot 
issues with Mozilla, we feel that your question would be best addressed 
by Mozilla's technical support.

Thank you,

Lydia
Microsoft Online Customer Representative


Seding a reply back

Comment 4

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

Getting lots of flack from them, I even got the same form letter back twice 
in a week! I sent them (being a different person each time) an email 
asking for them to forward this to the beta.msn.com webmastering team, 
got a contact there, but I'm not sure if he/she/it is in the right department. 
Don't worry, I'm making it work one way or another :)

Comment 5

[David Illsley]

This site seems to have been shunted up to the prime time and www.msn.com now
seems to be doing the same thing (see bug 106720 ). With a little bit of
fiddling, it seems fine if I use the NS6.1 UA string so I can't see any real
reason why they won't let mozilla in except that I think they are using a
positive matching scheme because if I use a completely makey uppy UA I get the
same error.

Comment 6

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

*** Bug 106793 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

zach, i'm updating the url and summary to reflect that they are live now...

Comment 8

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

I have been trying to get this to work, but they keep giving me flack in the 
way of form letters, I'll give them a ping and ask them what's up soon.

Comment 9

[Albert R.]

According to cnet, MSN will allow Mozilla and opera back in.  Just checked using
0.9.5, not fixed yet.  http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7660935.html

Comment 10

[Henrik Gemal]

*** Bug 106720 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Henrik Gemal]

opera did get PR out of this:
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/20011026.html

Comment 12

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

*** Bug 106989 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Bozhan Boiadzhiev]

can we have browser string per host.
so if MS wants to block browser which aren't IE 
mozilla wil send to stupid MS javascripts what they want.
so next time when some one one to block me i'll tell my mozilla
--tell this host that i'm with IE 7.0

Comment 14

[Albert R.]

Appears to have been fixed.  Using Mozilla 0.9.5 with a non duped UA string. 
Msn.com is coming up correctly I think.

Comment 15

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

ok, damn! They let us in now, but the site looks like crap (2001101908)

Comment 16

[Steve Chapel]

It looks fine to me using nightly 2001102603 on Windows 98.
Maybe someone can attach a screenshot of what looks so bad (using one of the
latest nightly builds of course).

Comment 17

[bclinger]

With build number 2001102603 - it does come up; however, it does not display
everything. For instance, w/IE 6, on the screen right now (10-27, 7:35 am in
Hawaii), there is at table CBNC on MSN Money that is not displayed with Mozilla.
It is also not displayed with NS6.1. It is displayed with 4.78; however, the
format is a bit different. Instead of to the right, 4.78 displays it underneath.


If I go to a smaller font display, such as 72 cpi, the information is displayed,
but the format is still different than w/IE 6.

Comment 18

[eyv]

Does it display badly with the original Mozilla userAgent string, with a duped 
string, or both?

Comment 19

[bclinger]

No, it does not display badly. It displays ok, just the text presented is not in
a slightly different order. If the same size font is used, the layout looks much
the same. Their statement about loosing some of the text/context or whatever it
was I read yesterday, really is not particularily valid and makes the
differences minor.

Comment 20

[Albert R.]

Attachment: Moz rendering of msn.com

Comment 21

[Albert R.]

Attachment: IE6 Rendering of msn.com

Comment 22

[Albert R.]

Using 2001102708, the only issue I see is the bullets are drawn a little
strangely.  Creating an attachment for a screenshot demonstrating this. 
Scrolling down and then back up seems to redraw the bullets correctly.  Probably
an unrelated moz bug but I didn't check bugzilla for reports of similar cases. 
Doesn't happen in 0.9.5.

Also, there are some tiny differences in layout between IE6 and Moz.  Also
creating an attachment of IE6's rendering of msn.com.  The difference is that
the little cells of information are in a table in IE and are just in a column in
Moz.  Not a big deal.

Comment 23

[James Cox]

just adding that Moz doesn't render this page incorrectly, from the quick scan
of the code I have just made.

As far as the table layout, the code is different in IE6/Moz build 2001110103.

eg, 

Moz:
<br class="clear" /></div></div></td></tr></table></div><div id="c989"
class="floatquad"><table class="cattbl" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
border="0"><tr><td class="cathead">
IE6:
</td></tr></table></div></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></div><div id="c989"
class="floatquad"><table class="cattbl" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
border="0"><tr><td class="cathead">

(same section)

CSS declaration is the same though, but I believe it uses .net principles: 

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://www.msn.com/styles/css-site1.ashx" />

time to be marked fixed?

Comment 24

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

fixed, beta.msn.com is closed

Comment 25

[Brant Gurganus]

Verified
2002022703/WinXP