330418 - faa.gov - UA string detection only works through Gecko/2006

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Philip Peake]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

This page shows real-time staus of US airports. Status is indicated by color codes. Placing the cursor over an airport displays a text box with descriptions of delays, reasons, etc.

This used to work before upgrading to Firefox 1.5.0.1

Now shows incorrect color codes and does not display text information (hover).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Browse to http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp
2.Look at colors of airports.
3.Place cursor over any airport.

Actual Results:  
Color codes are wrong, no hover box info.
To see correct information use FireFox 1.4 or IE.

Expected Results:  
Correct color codes, hover text boxes work.

I am marking this a major since this is a frequentloy visited site by people who define corporate policy. When they end up stuck in an airport for 12 hours because of a FireFox bug you can expect FireFox to be removed from corporate laptops at the very least.

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

This page works when I override the useragent to have ...Gecko/2005... in it (with ...Gecko/2006... only the BOS text box shows), so this seems to be a 'Y2K6' problem. 

See this part of http://www.fly.faa.gov/js_source/xbdhtml.js :

//Mozilla
	this.moz12   = (this.gecko && (agt.indexOf('gecko/20021130')!=-1))
//	this.moz13   = (this.gecko && (agt.indexOf('gecko/20030312')!=-1))
	this.moz2003 = (this.gecko && (agt.indexOf('gecko/2003')!=-1))
	this.moz2004 = (this.gecko && (agt.indexOf('gecko/2004')!=-1))
	this.moz2005 = (this.gecko && (agt.indexOf('gecko/2005')!=-1))
	this.moz13up = (this.moz2003 || this.moz2004 || this.moz2005)
//	this.moz131  = (this.gecko && (agt.indexOf('gecko/20030425')!=-1))
//	this.moz141  = (this.gecko && (agt.indexOf('gecko/20030624')!=-1))


See also bug 217844 -> Product: Tech Evangelism, Component: English US?

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Who would have thought that hardcoding UA strings right down to the build date wouldn't be a good idea!

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

I was going to mark this fixed, since the FAA has finally dragged themselves into 2006, but then, why? They'll just break again in 2007, since they didn't do anything but add another hardcoded year, assuming that all Gecko/2006 will be the same moz13up beast, and that Gecko/2007 will not.

Comment 4

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

yep. they are now broke for 2007

Comment 5

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Submitted "question" 070427-000039 through their feedback form, suggesting that if they don't want to change to sniffing that realizes the future is infinite, and the past is constrained, that they should add in ten years of the future, so we won't need to do this again until 2017.

Comment 6

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Mmm, I failed to notice that they are now broken in various and sundry other ways, even when you give them a 2006 UA. As they say,

"""
Firefox 2.x browsers include new "standards-compliance" enforcement code which is preventing the display of tooltip popups on fly.faa.gov.  The application code needs to be modified to be W3C compliant and it will be completed in the late fall calendar year 2007.
"""

which is somewhere between "not exactly it, entirely" and "not the way I would describe it," but I'm not going to keep this in my queries until late fall.

Workaround: just use http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/plaintext.html

Comment 7

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Do we have any contacts at the FAA? This is still very much broken approaching mid-2008 with any post-2006 Gecko build.

I suppose I'm probably the most likely person around here to have contacts at the FAA, though, huh? :-p

Comment 8

[Edward Rudd]

And in 2011 it's still broken.. Amazing.   Now it doesn't even display a map, they just put it in text mode.

Comment 9

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

Problem not found
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0