720122 - Firefox 10 Beta - Editing of Google Docs presentations is not supported in your browser

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[petersaints]

Attachment: A screenshot of the problem happening.

I found the following problem using Firefox 10 Beta (but I also reproduced it on Firefox 11 Aurora, and checked if it was "present" on Firefox 9.0.1)

What did you do?
1. Go to Google Docs (https://docs.google.com/)
2. Login (if you are not already logged in)
3. Open an existing presentation on your account (or create a new one)

What happened?
Google Docs gives the following error:
Editing of Google Docs presentations is not supported in your browser. 

What should have happened?
I should have been able to edit my presentation

The problem has only happened with presentations. On text documents and spreadsheets everything works ok. I believe (from playing a bit with the browser's user agent) that the problem is that they are identifying the browser has being version 1, because Firefox 10 is the first two digit Firefox version. 

I tried changing my user agent to:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:9.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0

Both worked... and suggest that they are only looking for the Gecko revision (I also changed the number after Firefox/ but made no difference if rv: wasn't changed). They should be considering only the first character after rv:, so for them rv:90 is Firefox 9/Gecko 9.

Currently this is a specific problem with Google Docs Presentation but it can affect many other websites that use similarly wrong coded techniques to determine a browser version.

Opera has faced the same problem when they reached version 10. They had to change the user agent to identify the browser as 9.80 (http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-ua-string-changes/). And they still do it today as far as I can tell from this site: http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Opera/

It's not really Firefox's fault but it's something that should be looked into once Firefox 10 reaches the release channel. Opera decided to not increase the number to 1x.xx to avoid this problems. Maybe an workaround like this is something Mozilla should consider for backward compatibility reasons.

I also talked about this problem on the mozillaZine Forums: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2392475&start=90
They suggested a similar bug from a few months ago (when Firefox 10 started to be worked upon on Nightly): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690196

I also reported this it back to Google: https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/docs/presentations/RSNmJfFUGz0

I hope all this helps to decide what's the best course of action to solve this issue (and other related issues).

Comment 1

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

Kyle, in another similar UA-related bug w/ Google (Blog I believe), you said to have contacts at Google. Could you notify them about this Google Docs Presentation problem?

I see the same than the OP w/ Nightly.

Comment 2

[Kyle Huey (Exited; not receiving bugmail, old account, do not use)]

Mail sent.

Comment 3

[Kyle Huey (Exited; not receiving bugmail, old account, do not use)]

Google is looking in to it.

Comment 4

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

The problem seems fixed for me. Petersaints, can you confirm?

Comment 5

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Confirmed fixed.