134025 - [INCORRECT BROWSER-SNIFFING] JavaScript does not display

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[michael.bell]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020310
BuildID:    2002031008

The middle column of the attached page (badpage.tar.gz) does not display at all.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.open page
2.notice that the middle column is not displayed
3.

Expected Results:  The column should be visible

Comment 1

[michael.bell]

Attachment: page with described errors

Comment 2

[Phil Schwartau]

Confirming reported behavior with Mozilla binary 2002032610 WinNT.
OS: Linux ---> All.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Save the above attachment locally
2. Decompress it with tar -zxf
3. View it in NN4.7 or IE6 : looks normal
4. View it in Mozilla : the central column is empty


In Mozilla we see this error in Tasks > Tools > JavaScript Console:

  Error: bwsr has no properties
  Source File: file://(path to)/CpHome_files/cp_std.js
  Line: 18

Comment 3

[Phil Schwartau]

In the top-level HTML we have this faulty browser-sniffing code:

var bwsr;
var all; 

if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") >= 0){
  bwsr = "IE" ;
  all = document.all;
}else if(isProperty(document.layers)){
  bwsr = "NN";
  all = document.layers;
}else if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Netscape6") >= 0){
  bwsr = "NN6";
  all = document.getElementsByTagName("*");
}


The check for Netscape 6 is not the right one for Mozilla.
As a result, in Mozilla |bwsr| and |all| are never initialized.
This causes the error reported above, and execution ceases. 

One can confirm this by going into the file cp_std.js and 
hard-coding the first two lines to: 

var bwsr = "NN6";
var all = document.getElementsByTagName("*"); 


Once you do that, the page loads fine. 
Reassigning to Tech Evangelism -

Comment 4

[Phil Schwartau]

Sorry, the browser-sniffing is not in the top-level HTML, it's in the 
file cp_std.js, which I will attach. Michael, thank you for zipping
up the page for us!

Comment 5

[Phil Schwartau]

Attachment: cp_std.js

Comment 6

[michael.bell]

I have been in contact with usaa about this. I don't know how things are handled
with evangelism, but if the correct browser sniffing code was posted here, I
would direct the usaa webmaster to this page. Perhaps he would be more likely to
check it out in context.

Comment 7

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

The correct thing to do would be to look for Gecko rather than Netscape 6.

That way any browser that used the Gecko engine would be covered.

The best site for this is:

http://developer.netscape.com/evangelism/docs/articles/find-gecko/

The easiest thing to do would be:

}else if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Gecko")

Note I sent email to the USAA web people about this a month ago and they ignored 
me. This seems to be pretty common in the web world.

Comment 8

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

I got a hold of some people on the phone and hopefully this will get resolved.

Comment 9

[michael.bell]

This bug is fixed as of last week. Thanks for your help!

Comment 10

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

tech evang june 2003 reorg