393786 - century21.com - performing search gives error dialog and null results with non-Firefox UA

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[u88484]

1) Go to century21.com
2) Type in any zipcode or city/state
3) Hit the find button
4) Next page loads but no results are shown, an error box is display saying "VRNetwork.GetExecutionID is not a function". 

Works in in IE7

Comment 1

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

This is caused by defective User Agent sniffing code on the site.  Works fine if I utilize the User Agent Switcher add-on to change the user agent string to either:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20070627 Firefox/2.0

or:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/20070627 Firefox/3.0

Comment 2

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

This works fine in Camino branch builds. What app is this bug being reported against?

Comment 3

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

This fails with Firefox trunk builds using the default user agent string.  That is the application this was originally reported on.

Comment 4

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I don't know why Camino branch is working -- it should be doing the same thing Firefox would if you removed the "firefox" from the UA string -- but regardless, there's definitely a UA-specific sniffer at work there:

https://realogy.infusiondev.com/appliancetoolkits/v1/jslibrary/CommonObjects/CommonObjects.js

   function isFirefox()
   {      
      var ffv = 0;
      var ffn = "Firefox/"
      var ffp = navigator.userAgent.indexOf(ffn);
      if (ffp != -1) 
         ffv = parseFloat(navigator.userAgent.substring(ffp + ffn.length));
         
      if(ffv>0)
         return true;
      else
         return false;
   }

That's not the only sniffing code they use, but it's the only sniffing code they use that I could find that appears to give different code to Firefox vs. non-Firefox Gecko browsers.

http://www.century21.com/js/global.js

contains a much smarter sniffer that doesn't look like it's to blame for this problem.

Comment 5

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

i have also found many sites using sniffer code that does not like the 'a8pre' at the end of the gecko version or application version very much either.  I don't know if that applies here.

Comment 6

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Please file additional TE bugs on those (or, if it's one common JS library at fault, against the library itself) and we can try to get something accomplished.

cl

Comment 7

[u88484]

Any luck on contacting century 21?  Just wondering since its been 4 months and still can not use century 21.

Comment 8

[u88484]

Century21 has redone their page and I can no longer reproduce this.

Comment 9

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Yep, looks like it's FIXED here, too.