334071 - mail.yahoo.com - Yahoo! Mail Beta should check for Gecko, not just "Firefox" (doesn't work in SeaMonkey, Camino, recent Firefox nightlies)

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Ian Neal]

If you try accessing the Yahoo! Mail Beta with SeaMonkey 1.5a trunk you get the following message:

Sorry, Yahoo! Mail Beta does not support your browser.

at this page:

http://uk.f311.mail.yahoo.com/dc/system_requirements?browser=blocked

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Resummarizing to reflect the fact that their UA detection doesn't work with recent Firefox nightlies either.

Comment 2

[Victor Escobar]

I don't know if this is the same bug, but using using krmathis' optimised Camino build Version 2006040808 (1.0+)(OSX 10.4), Camino totally **** out if I attempt to use Yahoo Mail Beta. It first warns me about 'rough seas ahead, your browser is not supported' and then all instances of Camino die...

Comment 3

[Jeremy Zawodny]

This has been reported to the Y! Mail team.

Comment 4

[Kevin Johnston]

(I work on Y! Mail.)  We're looking into the failure to admit newer Gecko browsers, but FYI Camino, specifically, is not an officially supported browser yet nor expected to be after this particular issue is resolved.  There remain a number of OS-chrome-related bugs with that browser that we have not resolved yet, hence the "rough seas" page will remain for Camino for the forseeable future.

Camino release 1.0 appears to me (from a test just now) to be largely functional.  Mostly it has some layout/z-ordering/event issues.

Comment 5

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

I get the "Browser not supported" message running on today's Intel Mac build - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1a3) Gecko/20060622 BonEcho/2.0a3. But running the same build on my PPC mac, it works fine.

Comment 6

[Ilya Sherman]

(In reply to comment #4)
> (I work on Y! Mail.)  We're looking into the failure to admit newer Gecko
> browsers, but FYI Camino, specifically, is not an officially supported browser
> yet nor expected to be after this particular issue is resolved.  There remain a
> number of OS-chrome-related bugs with that browser that we have not resolved
> yet, hence the "rough seas" page will remain for Camino for the forseeable
> future.
> 
> Camino release 1.0 appears to me (from a test just now) to be largely
> functional.  Mostly it has some layout/z-ordering/event issues.

Kevin, what sort of a test did you run?  Theoretically, <a href="http://www.geckoisgecko.org/">Camino uses the same Gecko rendering engine</a> as other Gecko browsers, so it's unlikely that these problems are unique to Camino unless they have been rather recently resolved in the Gecko core.  If the test was not written to specifically determine functionality, but rather tested functionality on pre-written code, you might try <a href="http://pimpmycamino.com/parts/user-agent">spoofing Camino's user agent</a> to Firefox to see whether it is the code that mistakenly causes Camino to have issues.

Comment 7

[Chris Casciano]

Yahoo mail beta was working [including letting me in] for some weeks in Camino including 1.1b which i'm currently running. However something changed between yesterday [or perhaps monday if i didn't check that account yesterday] and today. Today I got shocked by seeing the 'we don't support your browser' message for Beta mail.

Also, I could have sworn there was another TE [or perhaps camino] bug on this from the time when Beta mail first but I can't find it in search now..

This was working [for at least camino] but something changed in the last 24-48 hours]

Comment 8

[Chris Casciano]

[sorry for spam, trying to be complete] bug 338499 was the preview/beta sniffer bug I was thinking, might be useful to glean timeline from wrt. code changes at yahoo.

Comment 9

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Jeremy, any help would be appreciated.

Comment 10

[Kevin Johnston]

Chris, sorry for the hassle, beta Camino releases should still be seeing the "rough seas" page (with a link to try it anyway).  This clearly broke in last week's release.  Our schedule means this probably won't be fixed for several more weeks.

On the plus side, I took a spin myself with Camino 1.1b and many known problems have been resolved.  The new chat feature works great as well as several problems I encountered last fall.  We will evaluate whether to remove Camino from the "rough seas" check altogether.  I can't promise this will happen immediately, but we should restore the previous level of access within a few weeks.

Comment 11

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Kevin --

For testing purposes, you guys should be aware that the 1.1 beta is now a couple months old and has been superseded by the 1.5 release candidates. Here's the link to the latest nightly of what will become 1.5 as soon as we can release:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/camino/nightly/latest-1.5

I'd still be very interested to know *specifically* what sorts of tests you're running there that "disqualified" Camino 1.0.x yet allowed Firefox 1.0.x and 1.5.x, and I'm sure everyone else here would be equally interested.

cl

Comment 14

[Stuart Morgan]

Kevin, if you are still seeing issue in 1.5 (which I'm guessing is the case, since Camino continues to be banned three months later), please file bugs about them. We can't fix issues that we aren't aware of.

As it stands right now, we are being blamed by users for their inability to access the beta and we have absolutely no idea what it is that's causing the ban, which is very frustrating.

Comment 15

[Chris Casciano]

Just for point of clarification, using Camino 1.5, I still don't see a "rough seas"  page as Kevin commented that I should be in  c10

Instead I cannot progress through the beta at all, and see no option to switch to it. I am just told my browser is not supported and I *have* to use the old version

[dropping Camino in Summary to help searchers]]

Comment 16

[Kevin Johnston]

Everyone-- I'm sorry that weeks turned into months, but indeed the release we are currently testing restores the "rough seas" access to Camino 1.5. I tested this myself last week. SeaMonkey (I'm using 1.1.2) has unfettered access (I use it with the current public release of YMail Beta on Mac daily-- should be the same on Windows, please report it here if not).  The release with the Camino fix is still a couple weeks from hitting the first farms and will take 6-8 weeks to fully roll out on the Yahoo network.

I wish that we could just throw Camino open, but please understand that we are resource constrained. The same excuse applies to us filing bug reports-- it is time-consuming for us to debug, create test cases and submit bug reports. And understand that the reverse of the situation Stuart describes, where customers blame us for problems with Ymail on particular browsers, is equally common.

Test spins on Camino look good.  The items I am aware of are minor: the search button at the upper right renders with Aqua chrome on Camino, but not on Firefox, some key combinations generate different keycodes then FF (I would have to research this again, don't have the details handy), and for some keystrokes we apparently need to add some event cancelling because they generate sysbeeps on Camino which is very annoying for documented keyboard shortcuts (e.g. ctrl-period/comma for next previous message which I use all the time).

As noted earlier, the problems we have traditionally seen across browsers are not in Gecko itself, they are almost all like the above: at the interface between browser and OS (system widgets, event processing, etc.) -- exactly the areas where Gecko browsers differ from one another.

Once you get past the "rough seas" page, you can bookmark the resulting URL to bypass the warning page in the future.  The base url will vary across users, but you can generate this for your account NOW (with the current public release) by navigating to YMail Beta on Firefox, copying the URL, deleting everything after ?, and adding sysreq=ignore.  This is not an officially documented parameter and is not guaranteed to work indefinitely, but it works currently and in forseeable releases.

Comment 17

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Kevin, thanks a bunch for working to support Camino and SeaMonkey. Sorry for the differences that are causing you additional work. Perhaps if you contacted <http://www.caminobrowser.org/contact/>, it might be possible to reduce the differences in the future with regard to Camino.

Comment 18

[Stuart Morgan]

Thanks for the update Kevin. Some of the differences in event handling could certainly be Camino bugs (thankfully, starting with FF3/Camino2 there will be a lot less of that), so if you run into things you think might be bugs feel free to shoot me an email with what you know if that's more realistic than filing a bug given your resource constraints.

Comment 19

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Kevin, I'd also like to add my note of thanks for all your hard work on this.

(In reply to comment #16)
> Test spins on Camino look good.  The items I am aware of are minor: the search
> button at the upper right renders with Aqua chrome on Camino, but not on

That's because it's an input type=SUBMIT rather than BUTTON. If you make it a BUTTON, Camino will allow styles to be applied to it. (We have chosen to force Aqua styles on standard form elements, just as Safari does. There will probably  be a preference to allow sites to modify standard form controls with CSS in the future, just as there is a preference now for sites to use Javascript to move/resize/close/open windows.)

> Firefox, some key combinations generate different keycodes then FF (I would

I'll second Stuart's offer; if you don't have time to file bugs on these, shooting me an e-mail is an effective substitute if you can give specifics.

Thanks again.

cl

Comment 20

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Is this still a problem with the latest Yahoo Mail?

If it is, do we have any idea why or who to contact? I've been told Kevin is no longer with Yahoo Mail.

Comment 24

[Timothy Miller]

I would just like to confirm that this is still a problem with the latest Shiretoko nightlies with Yahoo mail.  I have to spoof my useragent to include "Firefox" to get it to work properly.

Comment 25

[Xavier OTTOLINI]

Attachment: Example of page with Camino 2

The message says : 
This browser is not included in the compatible applications. The new version of Yahoo! Mail has not been tested with this browser. You can chose to keep on using it or getting back to Yahoo! Mail Classic.

Comment 26

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

INCOMPLETE due to lack of activity since the end of 2009.

If someone is willing to investigate the issues raised in this bug to determine whether they still exist, *and* work with the site in question to fix any existing issues, please feel free to re-open and assign to yourself.

Sorry for the bugspam; filter on "NO MORE PRE-2010 TE BUGS" to remove.

Comment 27

[Ian Neal]

As most trunk browsers now have Firefox in their UA string has this gone away. Not sure INCOMPLETE is the correct closure though.

Comment 28

[Chris Casciano]

Yahoo Mail continues to periodically display the interstitial warning message (resembling Attachment in Comment 25 but in English) with Camino 2.1a1. I haven't been paying attention, but I'd say the last time I saw it was inside of the last 2 weeks.

I don't know what they are keying on (UA String, other info) but it's clear they don't think its equivalent to Firefox, even if they continue the behavior of letting you pass through after the warning that we've seen for some time.

Comment 29

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Is anyone willing to actually evangelize Yahoo on this?

Chris, are you using the standard Camino UA string, or are you using something else?

Comment 30

[Chris Casciano]

Just got the message again today. I don't think I've changed the UA string in Camino (if so it was so long ago I forgot). Reads as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en; rv:1.9.2.14pre) Gecko/20110117 Camino/2.1a1 (like Firefox/3.6.14pre)

I won't screenshot again, but the text in english is:

------
Hmm...your browser is not officially supported.
The all-new Yahoo! Mail hasn't been tested on your browser. You can choose to continue, or simply go to Yahoo! Mail Classic.
 
To continue to the all-new Yahoo! Mail anyway...

Go to Yahoo! Mail
	To proceed to Yahoo! Mail Classic...

Go to Yahoo! Mail Classic just this one time

Switch back to Yahoo! Mail Classic indefinitely -- or at least until your system is ready.
------

Comment 31

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Thanks, that looks standard. Just wanted to make sure.

I believe what's going on here is that Yahoo is specifically sniffing for individual browsers that they've tested and giving those browsers a "pass", while giving others the "you're not supported, but it might work anyway" page.

That situation is a lot better than denying entirely (for instance, Comcast), and frankly, I doubt it's worth expending resources on getting them to change their corporate mentality. If someone wants to, though, feel free.