(laugh) firefox causing website issues due to version

ChrisJumper · Advocate Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2400 Location: Germany

Welcome eccerr0r,

that's a nice Post. Cause this message and its work around is one of the good one. Yo may laugh about it but that issue was serious on chromeom and Googles Brothers Weeks before.

Right now i think you can ignore it, cause the most important Websites already patched it.

However, the Workaround is for bots or if you like to use Links, wget or youtube-dl to read or watch still old content.

So no its not about firefox only, its about Web pages. ;)

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3433

Well... The sad thing here is that websites actually check user agent string.
They have no reason to do that. And yet they go out of their way to punish people for straying from the blessed path of chrome, ff and opera.

Spanik · Veteran Joined: 12 Dec 2003 Posts: 1003 Location: Belgium

It's time programmers learn to write decent check code I think. Wasn't the reason Microsoft went from W8 to W10 because lots of installers checked for "9" and then decided it would have been W9x? Looks very similar to me.
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Expert in non-working solutions

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22673

That was the stated reason for not having a Windows 9, yes.

Asking people to write better check code is a nice idea, but considering the number of sites that were pushed to production with far more serious errors, I think it is unlikely to go anywhere. As szatox noted, the correct check here is not to check the user agent at all. For those rare sites that actually need to render differently, they should be directly testing the feature which controls their decision, instead of using a version lookup that assumes Firefox >= X works and Firefox < X fails.

gorg86 · Guru Joined: 20 May 2011 Posts: 315

You noticed that just now? That message has been there for a long time.