649500 - Youtube's html5 player not working on newest nightly due to UA sniffing

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Matheus Kerschbaum]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:6.0a1) Gecko/20110412 Firefox/6.0a1
Build Identifier: 

Apparently youtube is sniffing for Firefox/4.*, so the new Firefox/6.* builds don't get the html5 player.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Has anyone bothered contacting YouTube and informing them that they really, really, really, REALLY shouldn't be sniffing for browser names but rather rendering engines?

http://geckoisgecko.org/

cl

Comment 2

[alex_mayorga]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Has anyone bothered contacting YouTube [...]

I gave it a shoot at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=07924986d5ab8b8a FWIW

Comment 3

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

They are probably sniffing for something other than the UA string itself, because overriding the UA string doesn't help.

Comment 4

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

I sent a note to a venue where Google engineers can see it.

Comment 5

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> They are probably sniffing for something other than the UA string itself,
> because overriding the UA string doesn't help.

Something else could be e.g. window.navigator.vendorSub, but I didn't verify.

Comment 6

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Google has a fix. I'll leave the bug open until the fix has been deployed.

Comment 8

[David E. Ross]

Re comment #3:  Be sure to clear all cookies related to the affected domain before attempting to spoof a bad sniffer.  The first step should be to shut down your browser to clear all session-only cookies.  

The problem is that sniffing often involves setting cookies to indicate what UA was detected.  Thereafter, sniffing is bypassed in favor of using the cookies.

Comment 9

[u279076]

Until we have a better way to track bugs which will be fixed on mozilla-central but not necessarily tied to a feature page, I'm using a whiteboard tag of [fxN]

Comment 10

[u279076]

Apparently, "fixed on mozilla-central" was a bit confusing to some.  What I meant was that I need to be able to track bugs which will need verification during the scope of a particular cycle; regardless of whether its a firefox bug or not.

In this example, even though it's a Youtube bug, QA will still need to verify that it is working once Youtube claims it is fixed.

For now, QA has no better way to track these bugs in a single bucket without using the whiteboard tag.

Sorry about any confusion this has caused.

Comment 11

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Google has a fix. I'll leave the bug open until the fix has been deployed.

Can anyone elaborate on what that fix is, and whether it will work for any Gecko browsers other than Firefox?

Comment 12

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

Looks like the fix has been deployed.  The HTML5 player works for me in a current nightly.