959873 - b2g, text/vnd.wap.wml and UX - unhelpful blank page

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

This is a followup on the message sent to dev-b2g.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.b2g/e4dLmKqFThE

When accessing Web sites, sometimes Firefox OS is identified as a basic feature phone and is being sent to the WAP site. (below an example of that)

On Firefox OS, 
* the user gets a blank page. That's not very helpful. There should be a better way to inform the user that there is an issue. 
* the developer should receive a message in the console saying that the format text/vnd.wap.wml sent by the server is incompatible with Firefox on Firefox OS.


PS1: On Firefox for Android, the message is no better. You noticed that something has been downloaded and that's all.
PS2: On the Web Compatibility side, we attempt to get things fixed by contacting Web sites, but the user experience is still crappy if we don't get a quick fix.


Example:

→ http -v  GET http://wap.abchina.com/Portal/logon/Index.aspx  "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; rv:26.0) Gecko/26.0 Firefox/26.0" "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" "Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5" "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" "DNT: 1" "Connection: keep-alive"


GET /Portal/logon/Index.aspx HTTP/1.1
Accept:  text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Connection: keep-alive
DNT: 1
Host: wap.abchina.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; rv:26.0) Gecko/26.0 Firefox/26.0



HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 2616
Content-Type: text/vnd.wap.wml; charset=utf-8
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2014 03:08:00 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">

<wml>
   <head>
       <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="max-age=0"/>
   </head>
   <card id="card1" title="&#x4e2d;&#x56fd;&#x519c;&#x4e1a;&#x94f6;&#x884c;">
       <p>
           <img src="http://wap.abchina.com/Portal/Images/logo.gif" alt="&#x4e2d;&#x56fd;&#x519c;&#x4e1a;&#x94f6;&#x884c;" /><br />

              &#x5c0a;&#x656c;&#x7684;&#x5ba2;&#x6237;&#xff1a;<br /> 
                    &#x6211;&#x884c;&#x638c;&#x4e0a;&#x94f6;&#x884c;&#xff08;Android&#x7248;&#xff09;&#x5df2;&#x7ecf;&#x6b63;&#x5f0f;&#x4e0a;&#x7ebf;&#xff0c;&#x5982;&#x679c;&#x60a8;&#x4f7f;&#x7528;&#x7684;&#x662f;&#x5b89;&#x5353;(Android)&#x624b;&#x673a;&#xff0c;&#x6b22;&#x8fce;&#x70b9;&#x51fb;&#x4e0b;&#x9762;&#x7684;&#x6309;&#x94ae;&#x4e0b;&#x8f7d;&#x4f7f;&#x7528;&#xff1a;<br /> 
                    <a href="http://mobile.abchina.com/download/clientDownload/zh_CN/MB_Index.aspx"><img src="http://wap.abchina.com/Portal/Images/AndroidClient.gif" alt="Android&#x5ba2;&#x6237;&#x7aef;&#x4e0b;&#x8f7d;" /></a><br /><br />
              &#x767b;&#x5f55;&#x624b;&#x673a;&#x94f6;&#x884c;&#xff08;WAP&#xff09;<br />
           <a href="http://cmproxy.umpay.com/bankproxy/merproxy?BANKID=00015000&amp;MODE=2">>>&#x4e2d;&#x56fd;&#x79fb;&#x52a8;&#x7528;&#x6237;</a><br />
           <a href="http://10.199.89.20:9000/gateway?BANKID=ABC01&amp;MODE=1">>>&#x4e2d;&#x56fd;&#x8054;&#x901a;&#x7528;&#x6237;</a><br />
           <a href="http://wap.abchina.com/Portal/logon/Main.aspx?Corp=3">>>&#x4e2d;&#x56fd;&#x7535;&#x4fe1;&#x7528;&#x6237;</a><br />
           <a href="http://wap.abchina.com/Portal/logon/Explain.aspx">>>&#x4e1a;&#x52a1;&#x8bf4;&#x660e;</a><br />
           <a href="http://wap.abchina.com/Portal/logon/test.aspx">>>WAP&#x624b;&#x673a;&#x94f6;&#x884c;&#x9002;&#x5e94;&#x6027;&#x6d4b;&#x8bd5;</a><br /><br />
           <a href="http://abc.99wuxian.com">>>&#x201c;&#x638c;&#x4e0a;&#x751f;&#x6d3b;&#x3001;&#x7545;&#x4eab;&#x4e2d;&#x79cb;&#x201d;&#x79d2;&#x6740;ING...</a><br />
           <a href="http://3g.paybest.cn/abc_drawing.php?drawing=4">>>&#x6691;&#x671f;&#x201c;&#x75af;&#x884c;&#x201d; &#x4fdd;&#x9669;&#x3001;iPhone4s&#x9001;&#x4e0d;&#x505c;</a><br />
           -----------------<br /> 
               &#x5168;&#x56fd;24&#x5c0f;&#x65f6;&#x670d;&#x52a1;&#x70ed;&#x7ebf;&#xff1a;95599<br/>
               &#x4e2d;&#x56fd;&#x519c;&#x4e1a;&#x94f6;&#x884c;&#x7248;&#x6743;&#x6240;&#x6709;<br/><br/>
       </p>
   </card>
</wml>

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The current behaviour documented above is somewhat surprising. If Firefox gets a content type it doesn't recognise, surely the default behaviour should be to download it? Why don't we do that? Is it because it's XML? If so, why doesn't the user at least see the XML document tree?

Perhaps the right solution is like what we do for RSS and Atom feeds - a simple rendering (how hard could it be to have a stylesheet for WAP which at least showed the text?) with a bar at the top which suggests other ways of better viewing the content, and/or filing a bug, and/or complaining to the site?

There is also:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wmlbrowser/
which might provide some useful code if we want to do a simple WML rendering.

Gerv

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on