979693 - repubblica.it renders low-quality images on Firefox OS

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Mobile, defect)

Description

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

Attachment: Comparison screenshot

Repubblica mobile site sends pictures with lower resolution to Firefox OS's user-agent than others. This might be caused by them using an older version of WURFL, which is known to give misleading information about screen resolution for Fx OS devices (this is just speculation, use of WURFL happens on the backend and can't be detected).

Comment 1

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

The main feature article's image is right now
http://m.repubblica.it/i3/6581/N7083/N743407083/t-49589838/150704531-ce9272d0-7b88-4658-8df7-83aa5f3564b4.gif
Image info in Firefox Desktop gives this dimension information when it's embedded in the page:
88px × 52px (scaled to 398px × 235px)

The HTTP traffic analysis confirms that the markup sent to different browsers differs - look at Content-Length values below for evidence.

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: 7781
content-type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1

Response for: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:26.0) Gecko/26.0 Firefox/26.0'
Response Status: 200
content-length: 10401
content-type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1

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: 200
content-length: 10302
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Comment 2

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

The m.repubblica.it site intends to send a simple site with small graphics to low-end feature phones, and a more advanced version with larger graphics to smartphones. Unfortunately, it fails to detect Firefox OS devices correctly as smartphones.

Comment 3

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

If the site wants to use User-Agent based detection, they can tweak the configuration as follows: All mobile Firefox versions run only on smartphones. If the words "Firefox" and "Mobile" exist in the user-agent string, the site can assume that the device is a newish Android or Firefox OS smartphone and send the higher-end content.

Comment 4

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

Test passes, site works :)