1546167 - Broken Website - Charter Spectrum.net voicemail download

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect, P3)

Description

[Russ Hansen]

Attachment: Screenshot of broken webpage.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0

Steps to reproduce:

Visit spectrum.net, log in, check my voicemails, check off the voicemail I want to download, press the download button.

Actual results:

Broken page appears:

In the URL bar it says "data:audio/wav;base64,undefined"

Expected results:

It should have downloaded a file called "vm.mp3"

Both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome do this without issue. I launched Firefox 66.0.3 in safe mode to make sure it wasn't an add-on causing the problem. It doesn't work.

Looks like some kind of MIME code that Firefox isn't handling properly.

Comment 1

[Russ Hansen]

Attachment: Voicemail page before checkbox

Comment 2

[Russ Hansen]

Attachment: Voicemail page after checkbox

Comment 3

[Luciana queirolo]

Hi R. Hansen,

Please try to see if the issue is reproducible on latest Nightly, you can download it from here https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/
also, try it with a new firefox profile or on safe mode please.

Thanks!

Comment 4

[Russ Hansen]

It does not work in the Nightly with a new profile (which is the default) in default configuration.

It does not work in the Nightly with the new profile and safe mode.

It does not work with the old profile in Firefox in safe mode.

I'm not going to bother with a new profile in the release channel. It's clear this doesn't work right.

Comment 5

[Russ Hansen]

Sorry. That was a bit snippy now that I look at it.

TL;DR None of it works.

Comment 6

[Luciana queirolo]

Hi R. Hansen,

Thanks for the feedback!
Setting the component to "Download Manager" for further investigation.

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This looks to me like an issue with the site. If they send an mp3 file to download for other browsers, and they send us a broken data: URI, there's not much we can do about that. Without access to the site (which I assume is behind username/password login or similar), I'm not sure how to make progress here. Hopefully the web compat people have ideas about this.

Comment 8

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

R. Hansen, would you mind re-testing while spoofing as Chrome? Any number of addons will do (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/ is one I just found via a quick search). Install that, select Chrome on your platform, and then load the site to download your voicemail.

That would help us to know if the site is doing something weird. Thanks.

Comment 9

[Russ Hansen]

Masquerading as Chrome allowed the file to be downloaded. It worked.

Comment 10

[Russ Hansen]

In case anyone wants a workaround procedure:

At this point I have the User Agent Switcher and Manager add-on set in "white-list" mode with the tld "www.spectrum.net" whitelisted. Firefox automatically masquerades as Chrome 77.0.3835.0 on that site.

Everything works as it should. This is an adequate workaround for the problem.

Comment 11

[Oana Arbuzov [:oanaarbuzov]]

Unfortunately creating an account is not possible, thus I;m not able to verify the issue.
https://prnt.sc/zq7kck

R. Hansen can you still reproduce the issue?

Comment 12

[Russ Hansen]

(In reply to Oana Arbuzov [:oanaarbuzov] from comment #11)

Unfortunately creating an account is not possible, thus I;m not able to verify the issue.
https://prnt.sc/zq7kck

R. Hansen can you still reproduce the issue?

The issue has changed to deliberate non-support of Firefox. Now if you click on the download link, it doesn't do anything at all because Charter Spectrum has switched it to a link right back to the main voicemail page. It just reloads the page if your user-agent is Firefox. The download button behaves as a refresh.

But if I spoof as Google Chrome, the download link works. Basically, they fixed the problem by breaking the functionality entirely if the user-agent is Firefox. This makes no sense, because all I've done to make it work is tell it that I'm Chrome. Then it gives me a real download button. Then it works.

It probably makes sense for Mozilla to contact Spectrum at this point. The browser functionality isn't technically broken, it's being deliberately sabotaged. If I say I'm Chrome, everything works as intended.

Comment 13

[Ksenia Berezina [:ksenia]]

Hi R. Hansen, thanks for testing it with the UA spoof. I'll try contacting Spectrum to see if they can look into the issue. In the meantime we can also ship an UA override patch for the affected page.
Would you be able to share the url of the voicemail page (the one where the download button is located)? You can drop any query parameters or hash. For example something like &visitId=abfc1178-5e88-4415-870e-3f61aaad5d78 can be dropped

Comment 14

[Russ Hansen]

(In reply to Ksenia Berezina [:ksenia] from comment #13)

Would you be able to share the url of the voicemail page (the one where the download button is located)?

https://www.spectrum.net/voice/main.html#/page/voicemail

Comment 15

[Ksenia Berezina [:ksenia]]

Thanks R. Hansen. I've created a bug for an intervention

Comment 16

[Russ Hansen]

Excellent. I can test without a UA spoofer when the patch lands. I added myself to the cc-list for #1693827.

Comment 17

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Needs Triage.

Comment 18

[Oana Arbuzov [:oanaarbuzov]]

R. Hansen can you check now without the Intervention if it still occurs?

Comment 19

[Russ Hansen]

Great. I will check next time I get a voicemail.

Comment 20

[Russ Hansen]

(In reply to Oana Arbuzov [:oanaarbuzov] from comment #18)

R. Hansen can you check now without the Intervention if it still occurs?

Turns out I had one in the old messages.

Works perfectly without useragent spoof in v90.0. If it's landed in v90, then the problem is fixed.

Comment 21

[Oana Arbuzov [:oanaarbuzov]]

Based on comment20, I'll close the issue as Fixed.