471816 - yahoo.com, yahoo.co.jp, etc. - redirect to minimal page when the UA-string contains 2009

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[philippe (part-time)]

STR:
1. download/install the latest nightly Camino/Minefield/Shiretoko/GranParadiso
2. go to http://yahoo.co.jp/
3. enjoy minimal page with a warning to 'upgrade' your browser

Change the data in the UA string to say 'Gecko/20081231xx...' instead of 'Gecko/20090101xx...' and you get the normal page.

Comment 1

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

yahoo.com has the same problem; I think we should move this to en-US and have it cover all of Yahoo's properties, if possible.

Adding some people from bug 410430 for some déjà vu ;)  Kev, are you still the person to push this at Yahoo?  Can we convince them this year to abandon the broken "year sniffing" altogether? ;)

Comment 2

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

Forwarding to the folks at Yahoo, and I'll definitely ask them to review (and ideally trash) this policy. That said, I'm marking my calendar for next year :)

Comment 3

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Assigning to Kev since he's working on this, but really just so I can say wtf? Again? I *did* have my money on Yahoo though...

Comment 4

[Radek 'sysKin' Czyz]

Seems to work now, at least on .jp and .au (.com redirects me to .au so I can't check).

Moreover, I switched my UA date to 2010 and it still worked.

Comment 5

[pal-moz]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Seems to work now, at least on .jp and .au (.com redirects me to .au so I can't
> check).
> 
> Moreover, I switched my UA date to 2010 and it still worked.

.jp does not work yet.


and same bug, bug 471786

Comment 6

[Radek 'sysKin' Czyz]

OK I made a mistake, .jp indeed doesn't work. I didn't recognise the page to be the "minimal" one.

.au does work regardless of UA date *if* UA also says "Firefox". When I reset the product to "Minefield", date started to take effect and I got the minimal page (which is much more minimal that .jp's).

Comment 8

[u88484]

Attachment: Minimal page for reference

Comment 9

[baffclan]

reproduce UA(WinXP-trunk's UA)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ja; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090103 Minefield/3.2a1pre

can not reproduce UA (modifiyed "general.useragent.override")
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ja; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20080103 2008 Minefield/3.2a1pre

Yahoo's UA checker is watching "2008".

Comment 10

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

Just a quick update, I heard back from the Yahoo! Front Doors team today, and they're looking into addressing the issue and pushing a fix. They're also going to see if they can change the way they do agent string checking so we don't run into this in the future.

When I hear about a fix being pushed, I'll update the ticket.

Comment 11

[u88484]

Any chance this will be fixed before 3.0.0.6 is released? Since it will have a date of 2009 in the UA.

Comment 12

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

Yahoo! will be pushing the fix on 02-Feb-2009, and will be letting us know when the QA versions are pushed for testing. Do we have a definitive list of front-pages this affects?

Comment 13

[u88484]

Used http://world.yahoo.com/ for all links with the following results...Some of the ones on the works list might have the message but I can't read their languages.  The ones that I have that don't work that aren't English, I could tell by the browser names and versions listed in a box.  BTW, japan version works.  Also, it is weird seeing all the different designs yahoo has for their homepages.

Doesn't Work:
http://www.yahoo.com
http://asia.yahoo.com/
http://th.yahoo.com/
http://vn.yahoo.com/
http://ph.yahoo.com/
http://malaysia.yahoo.com/
http://sg.yahoo.com/
http://id.yahoo.com/

Works:
http://espanol.yahoo.com/
http://ca.yahoo.com/
http://qc.yahoo.com/
http://mx.yahoo.com/
http://co.yahoo.com/
http://ve.yahoo.com/
http://pe.yahoo.com/
http://br.yahoo.com/
http://cl.yahoo.com/
http://ar.yahoo.com/
http://no.yahoo.com/
http://se.yahoo.com/
http://fi.search.yahoo.com/
http://dk.yahoo.com/
http://ie.yahoo.com/
http://nl.yahoo.com/
http://uk.yahoo.com/
http://ch.search.yahoo.com/
http://es.yahoo.com/
http://ct.yahoo.com/
http://it.yahoo.com/
http://tr.my.yahoo.com/
http://ru.yahoo.com/
http://kr.yahoo.com/
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/ but has the message
http://cn.yahoo.com/
http://in.yahoo.com/
http://hk.yahoo.com/
http://tw.yahoo.com/
http://au.yahoo.com/
http://nz.yahoo.com/

Comment 14

[philippe (part-time)]

(In reply to comment #13)
yahoo.co.jp does _not_ work correctly (it should show the same largish multi column design as yahoo.com).

Comment 15

[Chris]

When I first upgraded to Firefox 3, the yahoo/xtra homepage did this same thing to me ( http://xtra.co.nz or http://nz.yahoo.com ) and I had to run a user agent spoofer to view the stuff. I sent in a complaint via email and I got some idiotic "you're the only person affected by this" response.

Worse, I had a friend send in a separate complaint afterwards and do you know what they got back? "Sorry, you're the only one experiencing this problem." ... Yeah, right.

So, it's amazing that anyone has managed to convince them that their site is broken and useless - my point is that once they claim to have "fix"ed it, I'd expect it to just happen again anyway. It will be fixed only when they abandon serverside agent sniffing altogether, or do it unobtrusively.

Comment 16

[u88484]

I said yahoo.co.jp worked but still had the message.  There is a heck of a lot more content on the Japan site then the regular yahoo.com.  But regardless, the message is on the site about needing to upgrade to a "newer" browser.

Comment 17

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Yahoo.com is fine for me using Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090127 Shiretoko/3.1b3pre

Comment 18

[pal-moz]

Yahoo.co.jp seems to be fixed.

Comment 19

[philippe (part-time)]

Both yahoo.com and yahoo.co.jp now load correctly here. But others in the list in comment 13 still fail for me:

> Doesn't Work:

> http://asia.yahoo.com/
> http://th.yahoo.com/
> http://vn.yahoo.com/
> http://ph.yahoo.com/
> http://malaysia.yahoo.com/
> http://sg.yahoo.com/
> http://id.yahoo.com/

Comment 20

[Radek 'sysKin' Czyz]

(In reply to comment #18)
> Yahoo.co.jp seems to be fixed.

...but change the UA date to 20100127 and it's broken again. So much for a "fix".

Comment 21

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

As folks have noticed, Y! Corp. pushed the changes yesterday, as has Y! JP. The remaining sites will be updated by the SE Asian team on Monday (Singapore time). While the fix currently in place is only a filter change to accept 2009 build IDs, they'll be working on changing their UA analysis in a release in the near future to remove the date-checking so we don't get to do this again.

Comment 22

[philippe (part-time)]

As far as I can tell, all Y! domains now work correctly. Resolving this as fixed. Thanks to all involved.

I didn't test what happens with a 2010 UA string. That is stuff for next years bug anyway :-)

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090322 Minefield/3.6a1pre