424002 - now.netapp.com - sends broken content to non-Firefox Gecko browsers

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Matěj Cepl]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080208 Fedora/2.20.3-1.fc8 Epiphany/2.20 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080208 Fedora/2.20.3-1.fc8 Epiphany/2.20 Firefox/2.0.0.12

(filed from the Red Hat bugzilla; originally https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438239)

See the attached screenshot, but it looks to me like if CSS was not filed. Caillon suggested that this might be the problem with broken UA sniffing, so I will make it blocking bug 334967.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.go to http://now.netapp.com/
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
poorly rendered

Expected Results:  
the same as with a regular Firefox (not Minefield)

Comment 1

[Matěj Cepl]

Attachment: screenshot from the downstream bug

Comment 2

[Matěj Cepl]

(In reply to comment #0)
> I will make it blocking bug 334967.

Too fast -- I cannot make it apparently.

Comment 3

[Ritesh Khadgaray]

Attachment: screenshot on minefield

Comment 4

[Ritesh Khadgaray]

Attachment: correctly rendered site

Comment 5

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

This is indeed happening if "Firefox" is not present in the UA string (confirmed with Camino with the "(like Firefox/3.0b5pre)" portion removed). It *looks* like the site is failing to feed non-"Firefox" browsers a proper CSS file.

I cannot for the life of me find how the server is doing the sniffing, however. It's not in the JavaScript, and the page source is served up exactly the same *except* for supplying an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE if you don't have "Firefox" in your UA. 

With "Firefox" in the UA, there is no DOCTYPE at all, which will, IIRC, trigger Quirks Mode rendering. This by itself may account for the differences in rendering -- which is probably *also* TE-worthy, since they should be serving up a DOCTYPE to Firefox as well if they're going to claim to be valid XHTML to other browsers -- but there's definitely some sniffing going on here.

Kicking to TE, tweaking summary, and confirming.

Comment 6

[philippe (part-time)]

The stylesheets are served as text/plain, which is the wrong mine-type for .css. In quirksmode (what 'firefox' browsers see), it doesn't matter, but with any doctype that triggers standard mode, the stylesheets are ignored.

mime-type should be text/css.

It looks like they are detecting Firefox, and conditionally remove the DTD to work around that mime-type issue, instead of fixing the server's mime-type file, which can equally be done with one line in an .htaccess file.

Comment 7

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> The stylesheets are served as text/plain, which is the wrong mine-type for
...
> It looks like they are detecting Firefox, and conditionally remove the DTD to
> work around that mime-type issue, instead of fixing the server's mime-type
> file, which can equally be done with one line in an .htaccess file.

This is Daily WTF-level material right here.

Comment 8

[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.