Closed Bug 513322 Opened 16 years ago Closed 12 years ago

Citicards login page prevents entering login and password under Linux

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
General
Platform:
x86
Linux
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: ralph, Unassigned)

References

(
URL
)

Details

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090803 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Shiretoko/3.5.2 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090803 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Shiretoko/3.5.2 When using Firefox 3.5.2 on Linux to goto the login page for Citigroup's citicards, the Firefox prevents the user from entering text into the login and password text fields. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. On Linux, open Firefox 3.5.2 browser. 2. Navigate to https://www.citicards.com/cards/wv/home.do 3. Click in either the "User ID" or "Password" field and try to enter text. Actual Results: You will not be able to enter text into the "User ID" or "Password" fields. Expected Results: You should be able to enter text into the "User ID" or "Password" fields. Clicking in the text fields does not show a cursor so it looks like focus is not getting set. Flash appears to be blocking the ability to enter text into the fields. The workaround is to right click on the Flash graphic and select "Play" in the resulting menu. The Flash program will run, producing a popup window. Select the "X" in the upper right corner of the popup window to close the popup. The user is now able to select the login or password fields and enter text into those fields. This is a long standing problem. If you do a Google search on firefox citicards, you will find complaints as far back as 2003. Note that Firefox 3.5.2 on WinXP works correctly, allowing the user to enter text into the signon and password fields without needing to launch the flash popup. I have opened this bug report because Firefox should have the same working behaviour on Linux as it does with Microsoft Windows.
I get a couple of these in the error console: Error: obj is null Source File: https://www.citicards.com/cards/wv/js/homeBott2Min.js Line: 23 Easy to reproduce under Linux and works fine under Windows XP. I highly suspect they're doing something stupid in there somewhere and this is either a TE bug or a Flash bug, but I'm not sure. Confirming, nonetheless.
Severity: minor → normal
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Summary: Citicards login page prevents entering login and password → Citicards login page prevents entering login and password under Linux
If you have a flash blocker installed you can work around this problem by disabling flash on their main page. I guess the flash content is somehow blocking the login text entry from getting focus.
If you change the User Agent to IE, it works fine in Firefox. If you try in Fennec 1.0 or Conkeror which is a xul based browser, it also works fine.
See Also: → https://launchpad.net/bugs/575897
Another thing is that the cursor is automatically put in the test field, so if you type your username, hit tab, and type the password, it seems to work. Tested on: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.3a5pre) Gecko/20100505 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Minefield/3.7a5pre and Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100417 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.4 <-- FIREFOX_3_6_4_BUILD3
Is this still an issue ? The site seems to be changed..
Flags: needinfo?(ralph)
Just tested and it seems to work now.
thank your for the response
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 12 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
Two and a half years later and now I can use Firefox 18.0.2 running on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS to login to CitiCards! This bug had prevented anyone from using Linux Firefox to access a large financial institution's site. This bug should have been given a higher priority by Mozilla at the time I opened it. The lack of response from Mozilla had caused me to give up on using Firefox entirely. I guess the only positive thing about this bug is that Mozilla kept it on the books. Maybe I'll try using Firefox again. Hopefully, Mozilla will now consider compatibility issues with major financial institutions' sites important enough to fix for users.
Flags: needinfo?(ralph)
Oops. Make that three and a half years.
(In reply to Ralph Navarro from comment #9) > I guess the only positive thing about this bug is that Mozilla kept it on > the books. Maybe I'll try using Firefox again. Hopefully, Mozilla will now > consider compatibility issues with major financial institutions' sites > important enough to fix for users. This was a bug in the page according to comment#3 We want to be compatible to the web standards as every other browser vendor but we are not doing something to workaround bugs in pages.
Did you notice that the problem worked fine in other Linux browsers but not in Firefox? What does that do for Firefox's market share? The current web standards have flaws which allow for interpretation. Isn't it also important to make a browser compatible to the de facto standards as interpreted by most other browsers? Your attitude is what drew me away from Firefox. I was almost willing to give Firefox another try. However, if Mozilla has attitudes like yours, I don't want to waste my time. Ralph
>Did you notice that the problem worked fine in other Linux browsers but not in Firefox? comment#3 says that just changing the user Agent makes it work. In case that you don't know what the UA is i will post my current UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 It's just a name that every browser sends to the webserver. If the behavior of the page changes with a UA change this is a 100% bug in the page that is detecting the user Agent string and does something different depending on the UA string. That means that you can use your "other browser" and change the User Agent of this browser and it should also fail to work. >The current web standards have flaws which allow for interpretation Such flaws will be discussed in the standard working groups if such a flaw is found. The standard will be changed based on that discussion. You can't simple change the browser to make it work because other pages will break with this change. >Isn't it also important to make a browser compatible to the de facto standards as interpreted by most other browsers? No, that would bring as back to the IE6 days with a complete broken web. >Your attitude is what drew me away from Firefox. I'm just a user like you but I try to tell people the truth. It seems that most people want to hear the usual marketing speak, full of lies :-(
> The standard will be changed based on that discussion. Poppycock! While, yes, the standard can get changed, the timing becomes too slow to be practical. The standard won't get changed for years after the initial conversation and after many discussions/revisions. Meanwhile, solutions have to be created and implemented by developers. The new standard looses its effectiveness until major browsers catch up. Comment #3 was posted 9 months afterwards. It has been so long, I don't remember if I tried Comment #3's suggestion or not. What I do remember is the frustration that I had with Firefox on Linux while this 'bug' on the site's page was able to work with Firefox on WinXP. Why is Mozilla treating Linux with a lower priority than MS? Shouldn't us users be able to expect that browsers have the same behavior across platforms? When the browser behaviors start to drift, is it unreasonable to expect that the browser with the worst user experience be the one to get fixed? We all know that MS Windows is a different enough beast than Linux which might make common behavior hard to achieve; but what is the harm in trying?
(In reply to Ralph Navarro from comment #14) > > The standard will be changed based on that discussion. > Poppycock! While, yes, the standard can get changed, the timing becomes too > slow to be practical. The standard won't get changed for years after the > initial conversation and after many discussions/revisions. Meanwhile, > solutions have to be created and implemented by developers. The new > standard looses its effectiveness until major browsers catch up. That is just wrong. Asking it the standards Working Group for something that isn't clear in the standards is pretty fast. No single browser vendor will change their browser to follow a different browser if they think they are correctly following the standard and it makes sense to do it in that way. What I don't understand is that your website screwed up and you are their customer. I would just move to a different bank. I did that once 8 years ago with an IE only bank webpage. Why should they fix their broken page if the don't have to ? > Comment #3 was posted 9 months afterwards. It has been so long, I don't > remember if I tried Comment #3's suggestion or not. What I do remember is > the frustration that I had with Firefox on Linux while this 'bug' on the > site's page was able to work with Firefox on WinXP. It can't be a Firefox bug if it works on Windows and doesn't work on Linux. There is no difference in the html/JS/imagelib etc. between the platforms ! The main differences are only in the graphic output and system integration like the default browser, Themes but that doesn't affect the content of webpages. > Why is Mozilla treating Linux with a lower priority than MS? Shouldn't us > users be able to expect that browsers have the same behavior across > platforms? When the browser behaviors start to drift, is it unreasonable to > expect that the browser with the worst user experience be the one to get > fixed? We all know that MS Windows is a different enough beast than Linux > which might make common behavior hard to achieve; but what is the harm in > trying? Again, the whole rendering code is cross-platform and the same source code is used on windows, linux, OS/2, BSD, AIX The only difference in your case is that Firefox tells the webpage that it's a Firefox browser that runs on linux and not on Windows.
The problem here, which happens on sites from time to time, is that they use lazy poorly written UA sniffing to check if they support a browser. I've seen plenty of sites, frequently banks, that have a list of UAs they support and have their site automatically say they don't support any others. Their whitelist gets the working site and everyone else gets an error message or broken code. It breaks for Linux not because of anything having to do with Firefox or Linux, but because in their lazy world Linux doesn't even exist. It looks for the versions of Firefox it supports on Windows and Mac, then assumes the rest are incompatible. It's irritating, but it happens (though less frequently these days, I think). In these instances it's not that Mozilla is treating Linux as anything other than a Tier 1 platform, it's the site doing it. Aside from hacking around it with UA spoofing, as mentioned above, the only recourse for things like this is to tell the site to fix it. After I confirmed this bug it needed a little more investigation, and one of use probably should've done so and moved this to the Technical Evangelism component to have someone ask them to fix it, though sadly, that often goes nowhere too. Sorry. Glad it's fixed now, though.
That being said, comment 0 did say people had been complaining about it since 2003, so sadly they just appeared to not care to fix it due to Linux's small marked share.
Thank you for taking the time to explain. I better understand what happened. However, we are mostly guessing here as to what the real problem was. If I run into a similar problem again, I will do a diff of the pages received by both browsers to see if the web site is actually doing something different. Ultimately, though I suspect you are both right about this problem. The financial institution should be supporting Linux better. If I run into this again, I will try to escalate the problem with the bank so it gets fixed. Otherwise, I will move to another bank. Sorry for the rant earlier.
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