226258 - national-lottery.co.uk - refuses to load any of the online games due to a faulty sniffer which refuses to accept Mozilla

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English Other, defect)

Description

[Martyn Dewar]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031030
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031030

The National Lottery Website has a faulty sniffer on its games pages which fails
to detect Mozilla 1.6 (Build 2003110115) as being a browser which can handle
secure transactions.

It claims that the following browsers are required:

    *  Internet Explorer 5.01 SP2, 5.2, 5.5 SP2 and 6.
    * Netscape 7 or AOL 7


Unfortunately, the problem seems to be down to a faulty sniffer, since I get the
exact same errors in Netscape 7.1 (Build 20030624 "Buffy").

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit www.national-lottery.co.uk
2. Click "Try game" underneath any of the links on the "Instant Win Games"
section of the homepage.

Actual Results:  
The website produces the following error:

 	 	
	
	Incompatible Web Browser
To allow us to give you secure access to this section of The National Lottery
website you must use a PC or Mac running one of the following web browsers:

    * Internet Explorer 5.01 SP2, 5.2, 5.5 SP2 and 6.
    * Netscape 7 or AOL 7

You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer from Microsoft here .

Expected Results:  
the website should have displayed the expected content (online games).

Comment 1

[Oleg Sidletskiy]

seeing this too:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031125
Firebird/0.7+

Comment 2

[Patrick]

*** Bug 229975 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Martyn Dewar]

Also not working in firefox 0.8 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8)

Comment 4

[José Jeria]

*** Bug 252089 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

*** Bug 235239 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Bruce Davidson]

*** Bug 269093 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Bruce Davidson]

Fixing summary to match guidelines, as dupes complained it was difficult to find.

Comment 8

[Martyn Dewar]

Sorry about the summary, my fault :| - I should read before posting ;)

Comment 9

[Patrick]

*** Bug 277252 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Steve Manning]

I have contacted them on several occasions about this and usually get the
standard 'use IE' reply. On pressing them it appears that the help desk has no
access to the technical staff so nothing gets done. Their latest suggestion is
to write (by snail mail) to the headquarters.

I get round this problem in Firefox by using the User Agent Switcher Tool
(extension) and change the user agent to IE6 whilst on the site then switch back
afterwards. The browser detection only seems to work from the user agent string
so its easily fooled and the site works perfectly in Firefox.

Comment 11

[Richard Lloyd]

As of Friday 15th April 2004, it looks like www.national-lottery.co.uk has been
updated to allow Gecko browsers in to its online games section (well, it worked
for Firefox 1.0.2 - haven't tried Mozilla). Hence, assuming other people see
this too - see http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6426 - this bug
can probably be closed now.

Comment 12

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

cool. Thanks Richard. The power of % (and choice) rules.