171730 - abbeynational.co.uk - Online banking denies access to mozilla

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English Other, defect)

Description

[Ian Neal]

Abbey National have just upgraded their e-banking login page to browser sniff
unfortunately it doesn't like mozilla.
Go to above URL and click on e-banking logon button, comes up with page
recommending you upgrade your browser. 
Using BuildID 2002091508 on WinXPSP1

Comment 1

[Ian Neal]

Site drops 3 cookies so you only get the message once in a 24 hour period (I
think). If you set the UA string to be NS4.x no message about upgrading the
browser appears. If you set the UA string to be NS7 or reset to the mozilla one
then you get a complete denial. If you set the UA string to be NS6.x then you
get an extra button on the page that comes up letting you click on it to login.

Comment 2

[Ian Neal]

Attachment: Browser sniffing page

Comment 3

[Mitch]

Reporter please change Platform/OS to All/All since we are seeing this
on Solaris and Linux as it is a generic problem.

This is really irritating and surely is a reason to change banks (for
me at least). Service like this is deploreable.

Unfortunately i can't seem to coax mozilla into passing a useragent of
4.x 

 user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.75 (compatible; MSIE 5.01;
Windows NT 5.0)");

as i get a error 

  INTERNAL ERROR on Browser End: Expected a version > 5! Version = 0
  System error?:: No such file or directory

upon startup.

Anyone know of a war round this (apart from moving banks)?

I believe if we could set navigator.platform, 
navigator.appName we could probably fake the www site to allow us in.

Comment 4

[Mitch]

See also bug 115773 .

Comment 5

[Ian Neal]

I have spoken to someone on their e-commerce support line, who was aware of the
problem and had also warned them it would block Netscape 7 (and Mozilla)
browsers. As far as know the only work around is to spoof the UA string, though
that causes problems with the internal checks by the java plugin (see bug 106727
and bug 83376) if you forget to reset it before exiting mozilla.

Abbey National currently do not officially support the use of Netscape 6 with
their website (but you would expect them have the same level of unoffical
support on Netscape 7 and Mozilla as they do for Netscape 6).

Can anyone see what needs to be tweaked to let NS7 and Mozilla in as well as NS6?

Comment 6

[Mitch]

Thanx Ian, thats the temporary fix. 

Set the ua sting in your user.js file to

  user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.75 (compatible; MSIE 5.01;
Windows NT 5.0)");

and then uncheck the Preferences->Advanced->Enable Java and then i can get
in.

This is still exteremely inconvienent.

I am about to protest strongly to Abbey National and lodge an official
complaint.

Comment 7

[Mitch]

After several complaints to Abbey National (apparently they recieved
hundreds) this is now fixed. ou can visit the www site online banking
with no useragent fiddling. Hurrah !!!!

Tested with cvs 20021010

Can reporter confirm and close bug as FIXED.

Comment 8

[Ian Neal]

Confirming that they now let you in with just a message about using an
unsupported browser.

Comment 9

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

tech evang june 2003 reorg