497384 - facebook.com - chat and other notifications in "taskbar" not working due to user agent sniffing

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Was noticing when my wife is using Facebook in 3.0.10 on her computer that notifications pop up in a small box in the lower right corner as they happen, in addition to the little red number balloon show up on on the notification icon.  Neither of those things happen in Shiretoko; I don't get the popup notifications at all, and the red number balloon doesn't show up unless I reload the page.

Comment 1

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

Is there anything in the error console?  Why do we think this is a JS engine bug?

Comment 2

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090607 Shiretoko/3.5pre

Chat doesn't show up for me as well. Works on trunk, maybe fixed on a recent push to branch?

Getting this on the blocking radar...

Comment 3

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Is there anything in the error console?  Why do we think this is a JS engine
> bug?

Sorry mid-aired :( . I can't think of anything else that would break this, the chat box shows up briefly, then disappears, so I assumed if there were any errors the page was consuming them, I'll try to get something more concrete...

Comment 4

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

The chat list shows as offline, and gets hidden via the id #presence.buddy_list_hidden.presence_error #buddy_list_tab . The notifications thing is hard to repro, it's a timing thing, you need to get one while you're in facebook...

/me pulls and rebuilds

Comment 5

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Using latest branch nightly I get:

 - notifications of new chat messages (thing changes colour, little balloon)
 - notifications bubble exists on first load

I have my UA string manually set to 3.0.x, though, so perhaps this is UA-sniffing?

Comment 6

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

facebook is notorious for bad user-agent sniffing. I've complained multiple times.

Wouldn't surprise me if it is indeed broken user-agent checks.

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Actually, now that you mention it, chat hasn't been showing up for me for the last week or two.  Didn't complain about that because I like it that way.  I'm logged into Facebook Chat from Adium, so the duplicate chat window in my browser just gets in the way.  I thought maybe they got smart and realized if I was connecting from Adium I wouldn't also want it in my browser.

Comment 8

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

And to clarify, the notification icon shows up fine on initial page load, I'm talking about notifications that happen after you already have the page open.  If you leave the page open, periodically you get the "Show XX new posts" at the top that you can click to show the new posts that have happened since you opened the page.  At the same time that shows up, the notification icon would also show up if you had new notifications in that time.  That's what doesn't happen.  I have to reload the page to get the notification icon.  My wife also gets a rounded-corner gray background popup in the lower right corner with the text of the notification if there was only one (she's using 3.0.10).  I don't get those at all.

Comment 9

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Just confirmed on latest 191:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090610 Shiretoko/3.5pre

All this doesn't happen on trunk.

Comment 10

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Blech, it's a ua sniffing thing.

general.useragent.override "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10"

makes all these issues go away, afaict. Please confirm.

Comment 11

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Dave: not sure that the Notifications use case that you're talking about is actually designed the way you think. I only sometimes see "instant" notifications, they usually require page reloads or some form of navigation event. I don't think they're sitting on a timer getting updates every N seconds.

Comment 12

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Blech, it's a ua sniffing thing.
> 
> general.useragent.override "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US;
> rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10"
> 
> makes all these issues go away, afaict. Please confirm.

Confirmed.  I just set my useragent to claim to be 3.0.10 and I now get popup notifications when the status comment is made (yes, it does indeed work that way, it's on a timer checking for them), including the little popup notification div with the text of it.  In fact, my recent chat with Beltzner popped up, so they're breaking chat based on UserAgent, too.   Wonderful.

Comment 13

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Add this to the litany of other Facebook UA bugs...

Comment 14

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

I couldn't find a facebook bug report on this. Is there one?
(http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/)

Comment 15

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Do they work with the user agent set to 3.5? Want to know if this is an issue we need to resolve with them before launch.

Comment 16

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

OK, confirmed... taking the default useragent string and doing s/Shiretoko/Firefox/ on it does indeed result in things working properly, so if the browser claims to be Firefox 3.5 it'll actually work.  They're just being mean to the Shiretoko branding.

Comment 17

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #16)
> They're just being
> mean to the Shiretoko branding.

s/the Shiretoko branding/any Gecko browser that does not include the word "Firefox" in the UA string, including Seamonkey, older versions of Camino, any prerelease Firefox, etc.

With all the ex-Mozillans over there at Facebook, you'd think this wouldn't be an issue any more. Yet it continues to be an issue again and again and again. When is this going to stop?

Comment 18

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Chris, Reed: please avoid from excessive kvetching in bugs. Perhaps you should ensure that the issue is indeed on file as David asked in comment 14

Comment 19

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

(In reply to comment #18)
> Chris, Reed: please avoid from excessive kvetching in bugs. Perhaps you should
> ensure that the issue is indeed on file as David asked in comment 14

facebook does not have a public bug database, and issues filed in the bugzilla instance mentioned in comment #14 will only get marked as invalid.

Comment 20

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I'll concur with Reed, there's nowhere to file bugs on the public website in their Bugzilla, only for the various developer APIs.

Comment 22

[Tristan Miller]

This issue was reported and discussed recently on the mozillaZine forums: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=575091&sid=0fcd917ff49ee7b1e51c13701297c715

Comment 23

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Ilya said he could take this.

Comment 24

[Tristan Miller]

I think this issue has been fixed, at least partially.  I haven't tested chat, but the notifications balloon/popup has been working for me for a few weeks now.  Unfortunately, there is now a new Seamonkey-specifc problem; namely, Facebook doesn't allow users to post status updates any more.

Comment 25

[Tristan Miller]

In case anyone is curious, a bug report has been filed for the status update problem.  See Bug 519995.

Comment 26

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

The notifications popup has never been particularly broken in Camino, but the chat thing is still busted. See bug 430436. The status update problem is a dupe of bug 516842.

Comment 30

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

What I can see with current builds is that the chat is working fine in nightly builds now. But the box are not served for builds which user agent string contains MozillaDeveloperPreview.

Comment 31

[Oskar Ivanić (:icecold)]

Does this means that next Firefox alpha 3 developer preview won't be able to use Facebook chat?

Comment 32

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

I would say yes. I don't think that Facebook will change anything here in the near future.

Comment 33

[Tristan Miller]

Is this bug still valid?  Facebook recently completely revamped their user interface.  I haven't noticed any problems with it when using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100206 SUSE/2.0.3-6.1 SeaMonkey/2.0.3.

Comment 34

[Oskar Ivanić (:icecold)]

I there are no problems with other versions of Firefox (3.5 and 3.6) , only problem is with Developer Preview. Chat works normally on 3.7a3pre.

Comment 35

[Oskar Ivanić (:icecold)]

Can alpha 3 not to contain MozillaDeveloperPreview beacuse of FB chat issue?
Because it's forcing us to move on pre-alpha builds if we want to use chat.

Comment 36

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #35)
> Can alpha 3 not to contain MozillaDeveloperPreview beacuse of FB chat issue?

That's about as valid as asking the UA string to be identical to IE's. In other words, no, modifying the UA string to fix other people's bugs is not something we want to encourage.

Comment 38

[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 39

[Philipp von Weitershausen [:philikon]]

I'm seeing this with Firefox 4 nightlies and betas. It works fine with the same account and on the same network in Firefox 3.6 and other browsers (e.g. Chrome).

Comment 40

[Bernd]

I see this with 15.0.1 release