430436 - facebook.com - chat tells non-Firefox Gecko browsers they're running an "old web browser"

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Simon Howes]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3
Build Identifier: 

It seems the Facebook are not supporting many Mozilla browsers with their new Facebook Chat feature.   Sniffing for Firefox 2 UA, not Gecko.  Shame on you Facebook!


Quote:
"If you are experiencing problems with Facebook Chat, you may need to upgrade your browser. We currently fully support the following browsers:
PC:
    * Internet Explorer 7.0
    * Firefox 2
    * Safari 3 

Mac:
    * Firefox 2
    * Safari 2
    * Safari 3"



Facebook is a very popular site so severity is critical.  

Reproducible: Always

Comment 2

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Conforming summary to TE guidelines.

Comment 3

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

I just spoke to one of contacts at facebook about this bug. He's going to escalate it to the chat team. I mentioned http://geckoisgecko.org to him, too.

Comment 4

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

facebook added a ton of Gecko-based browsers to their whitelist, as per my request, but browsers are still being used as the checking point instead of Gecko. Keeping this open until facebook either swaps to a blacklist (which they say they will be doing at some point) or until they swap to using Gecko for checking instead of a list of browsers.

Comment 5

[Peter S.]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430912

FYI.  Dupe?

Comment 6

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430912
> 
> FYI.  Dupe?

Based on the fact that you're experiencing the same symptoms when spoofing as IE, probably not.

Comment 7

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> facebook added a ton of Gecko-based browsers to their whitelist, as per my
> request, but browsers are still being used as the checking point instead of
> Gecko.

And they're now back to sniffing for "Firefox", because Camino can't get in without the word "Firefox" in the UA string as of this morning.

It worked fine last night.

Comment 8

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Reed, what's the latest on this? Who do we have to bother over there to get this working? Comment 7 still applies.

Comment 9

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Reed, what's the latest on this? Who do we have to bother over there to get
> this working? Comment 7 still applies.

Spoke to my facebook contact, but he's too busy to look into it right now. You could try filing a bug on http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/. Otherwise, I'll poke him again next week.

Comment 10

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Reed, can you poke him again? I now get

"You're using an old web browser to browse Facebook. To use the full version of Chat from within a regular Facebook window, please upgrade your browser.Switch to Firefox"

when opening chat in Camino without the "like Firefox" part in the UA. Why on earth aren't they, of all people, doing Gecko sniffing?

Comment 11

[Ming Tang]

Facebook and Hotmail used a poorly-built user-agent sniffing.
It should search for the string Mozilla or Gecko instead of using
Mozilla/* * Windows (XP|Vista) *

Comment 12

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #11)
> Facebook and Hotmail used a poorly-built user-agent sniffing.
> It should search for the string Mozilla or Gecko

Yes; that's why this bug exists. Instead of telling those of us who are already well aware of the problem, would you please complain to Facebook?

Comment 13

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #9)

> Spoke to my facebook contact, but he's too busy to look into it right now. You
> could try filing a bug on http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/. Otherwise, I'll
> poke him again next week.

Filed as

http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4044

but another poke would still be appreciated.

cl

Comment 14

[glenn]

Not sure if this it the right place to log this, but exact same facebook issue here. 

I am running: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090324 Shiretoko/3.5b4pre ID:20090324110657

Comment 15

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Ilya said he could take this.

Comment 17

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

I don't see the reported issue with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2b4pre) Gecko/20091119 Namoroka/3.6b4pre ID:20091119033555

Has it been fixed meanwhile? The mentioned bug report from comment 13 has been marked invalid and moved to another unknown location. So no idea about the bug status on Facebook's side.

Comment 18

[Tristan Miller]

I'm not experiencing this problem with Facebook chat.  I'm using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091210 SUSE/2.0.1-1.2 SeaMonkey/2.0.1.

I suspect this bug can be closed.

Comment 19

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Thanks Tristan. Now that two people cannot reproduce this problem lets close it as WFM. If you still see this issue feel free to reopen.

Comment 20

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I'm going to re-open this until we hear from Ilya, since he's the one who was supposedly working on fixing this at Facebook.

Comment 21

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Facebook seems to have updated their UA detection recently. Is this still a problem for anyone who was originally seeing it? It works for me using a recent Camino nightly with the "like Firefox" portion of the UA string removed.

Comment 22

[Andrew Truong [:feer56] [:andrewtruong] [:atruong]]

Closing bug as WFM since I can't reproduce this anymore.