978829 - babylon.com sends desktop site to Firefox OS

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Comment 1

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

The babylon.com site is set up to redirect mobile browsers to their mobile site.

Unfortunately, it does not recognise Firefox OS devices as smartphones. Here's some HTTP traffic analysis that shows how their server-side detection works:

Firefox Android and Safari on iPhone are redirected to http://www.babylon.com/products/mobile/m_main.html, Firefox OS not redirected

Selected HTTP response headers (Firefox OS, Firefox on Android, Safari on iPhone):

Response for: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; rv:18.1) Gecko/18.1 Firefox/18.1'
Response Status: 200
content-length: 0
content-type: text/html

Response for: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:26.0) Gecko/26.0 Firefox/26.0'
Response Status: 302
content-length: 0
location: http://www.babylon.com/products/mobile/m_main.html
content-type: text/html

Response for: 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25'
Response Status: 302
content-length: 0
location: http://www.babylon.com/products/mobile/m_main.html
content-type: text/html

Comment 2

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

This bug is now fully analysed and anyone in the Mozilla community is welcome to reach out (politely! ;)) to babylon.com. 

You can use this letter template or tweet:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/StdLetters#Spanish

and also include this URL:
http://webcompat.com/simplebug/?id=978829
to give the site's webmaster a quick overview of the bug.

If you contact the site, please assign the bug to yourself and change "[contactready]" to "[sitewait]" in the box named "Whiteboard" (ask me if you can't change it).

Thank you!

Comment 3

[Guillaume Démésy [:magsout]]

Reached out via twitter: 

https://twitter.com/magsout/status/502003903475773440

Comment 4

[Guillaume Démésy [:magsout]]

It's weird, but there is no more mobile website ? I Just try on iOS and expect home page that propose to download app, the rest of website is desktop version : http://www.babylon.com/?disable_platform_detection=1

Comment 5

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

well, OK. Some sites do that, pretend desktop+iOS/Android apps is all it takes. Let's call it wontfix.
(AFAIK this site mostly appears as important because they use dubious browser addons to take over as default search engine and such. Appears somewhat scammy.)