603694 - [meta] -- Sites should detect Fennec's UA and serve "mobile" content if present

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Alon Zakai (:azakai)]

Many mobile websites, for example cnn.com, do UA sniffing which does not work with Fennec. The result is that iPhones and Android phones show the proper mobile page, but Fennec loads the normal page, which is much slower and doesn't work as well on phones.

Users may blame Fennec for the slowness and breakage, so would be great to improve this situation.

Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Is this intended to be a meta (tracker) bug, or is there a specific site this was filed for? Just curious.

Comment 2

[Alon Zakai (:azakai)]

I'm not sure how evangelism bugs usually work - if such bugs should be about a specific website, then cnn.com should be it.

(This is a very general issue though, I've seen other websites with that issue in the past. But hopefully things are improving...)

Comment 3

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Based on your original report and on comment 2, it sounds like it would be useful to have a tracker for this, and then file individual bugs for specific sites that need to be evangelised (and mark those bugs as blocking this one).

cl

Comment 4

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

As part of this bug or a new bug, we should also provide documentation on MDN that recommends how to make mobile sites work in Fennec, including how and when to use media queries, feature detection, UA sniffing, etc.

Comment 5

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> As part of this bug or a new bug, we should also provide documentation on MDN
> that recommends how to make mobile sites work in Fennec

Ideally in a new bug, and I meant to suggest exactly this in comment 3 as well. VERY good idea.

Comment 6

[Alon Zakai (:azakai)]

Much of the criticism about Fennec 4.0 beta 2 is around this issue, e.g.

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1855948&cid=34139956
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/11/hands-on-latest-firefox-mobile-beta-is-svelte-and-smooth.ars?comments=1#comment-20982399

Comment 7

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

The purpose of Web Compatibility Mobile effort is exactly that. It is handled by the Mobile Component and the activity on the wiki. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/Mobile