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MSN Blocks Mozilla, Other Browsers [updated]
k_hokanson writes: "I was just going to check out some tasty news articles, with my trusty Mozilla, at MSN. but what do I get when I go there? A nice little message telling me that 'in order to display this page properly', I have to get the latest version of IE! And no, there's no option to display it incorrectly. " Enough people have submitted this story that it can't be an isolated case;) Thanks, Microsoft. Here's the story on Yahoo!. CT: telling konqueror to lie about its User Agent causes the page to render correctly save the background which is the wrong color. Update: 10/25 23:19 GMT by T : kuwan writes "Looks like Microsoft was getting too much heat. CNet is reporting that Microsoft is backing off on their browser block. I'm only wondering how long it will be before they do it again with some other excuse as to why we all need IE."
Just tried with NS 6.1. Everything displayed okay.
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I hope AOL starts using Mozilla in their software. After MS sees all those user not liking it, maybe they will change.
At least MSN just turns you away. The last time I loaded up Windows update in Mozilla it went berserk and I had to escape out of X to get my system to respond to me...
Here's the a thread about this from the XP article.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Check out the news.com article here
I got pals who got Netscape 6 entering MSN just now.
Anyway, if they don't do that, how can they keep up with their awesome reputation of snuffing out competition?
You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance.
Hmmm. Perhaps the Borg adapted after the story came out?
Every so often I run into some page or another that insists on IE. I have an easy solution; I just don't go to those pages. I would be somewhat curious to know how they're blocking the pages; is it just a name check which you can work around by setting the propery in Mozilla that reflects the browser type? Or do they do some sneaky ActiveX thing that you can't get around?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What would a Mozilla user (or strictly speaking, beta tester) want to browse MSN for? Fair question, no?
Helium balloons want to be free.
find out what is reported by IE/NS and have Konq send that out as the ID.
twenty seconds between replying and hitting submit.. pfft
Apparently MS is only blocking OS's that have IE available (Win32 / MacOS)...there is hope: A story on mozilla.org shows how to change what your browser reports as its UserAgent (Customizing Mozilla). Change (or create) user.js in your Mozilla Profile directory, and place this in it:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22smp i686; en-US; m18) Gecko/20010110 Netscape6/6.5");
Mozilla on Win32 now gets in... But this just adds to the evidence against anything MS...
Because MSN in Brazil which I presume has the same new look renders fine. In Mozilla, at least. Depending on your browser you'll see different things, see The Register for more info.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
So far I've confirmed that Opera (as stated in the article) for OS X is shut out as well as Mozilla. But other (less used) browsers like OmniWeb and iCab (for Mac OS X) will be let through even though these browsers don't support the features that Opera & Mozilla do. Maybe they just want to shut out all the most popular non-Micro$oft browsers. Sounds a little fishy to me.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
There are several local proxy type freeware or OS programs out there (I'm not sure if the Proximitron [http://www.spywaresucks.org/prox] does it, though it will mask the browser information) that will intercept all HTTP traffic and modify it.
:) Then again, without viewing the site, I would wager that MSN uses JavaScript to do this. In that case, filter it.
I would bet that some of these programs can forge the browser type headers.
Do you like German cars?
May be it's a private club!
I'm from Argentina: Tango, Asado, Mate, Gaucho, Maradona, YPF
I doubt there is any sort of restriction on this,
without proper standards, and/or use of those standards we will continue in a one browser world.
This sounds particularly hoaxy though, so ehh we shall see.
I'd like to see W3 really penalize this type of behaviour, at least amoungst major companies.
Guttermouth is a really good band.
... So, what exciting content am I missing out on, exactly? Advertisements for XP, maybe?
Let 'em keep their site locked up. They're under no compunction to let me see what they're doing anyway.
I think there is a way to change the HTTP headers in Mozilla and Konquer (others?) to show it as an IE client. Try that.
Not a typewriter
It's not very coincidential that MS blocks non-IE broswers on the day they release their flagship new OS, designed to put .NET's foot in the door. What does this mean? Since Passport is becoming a big deal with them, and is only supported on the Windows platform with IE, why should non-IE browsers even try to access Passport sites? This is all part of MS's strategy to push .NET out, so that Windows will be the one and only OS that will "take full advantage of the internet".
Pretty slick.
either the page is poorly designed, or IE 5.5 is, because it doesn't even render correctly when i use the borg standard!!
here's a screenshot of the page that i'm getting in IE 5.5.
anybody else seeing the same thing?
"Microsoft is seeing (that) it is an Opera browser and shutting it out," said Tetzchner, whose team was testing the problem Thursday. "If you change the Opera string by one letter, it is letting us in."
What is causing me not having the capability to login to Hotmail with latest Mozilla(0.9.5)?
Is this a Mozilla bug or is it an evil MS deed?
Seems to work for me (NS 4.78). I wonder whether they will notice if their webserver gets /.'d.
a lot of other browsers allow you to change you're user agent, so I'm not sure if "all browsers" apply. Opera can pass itself off as IE - it's just a simple option in the preferences. Not that I would advocate supporting any site that pulls this sort of stunt, but there are work arounds.
Attention: Web Browser Upgrade Required to View MSN.com
If you are seeing this page, we have detected that the browser that
you are using will not render MSN.com correctly. Additionally, you'll
see the most advanced functionality of MSN.com only with the latest
version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or MSN Explorer. If you wish to
visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below.
* Internet Explorer for Windows
* Internet Explorer for Macintosh
* MSN Explorer for Windows
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Ive just been there with OmniWeb under Mac OS X.
No Problem at all.
no problem on my mac with netscape communicator 4.75
is it just the open source browser?
When M$ first realized that they miscalculated with the internet party and created msn, they would crash netscape browsers. Anyone else remember that? Luckily there wasn't anything too interesting on msn (or msnbc) at the time so it wasn't a big loss, just annoying. Also, later on when they started "embracing and extending" there were webpages that would have problems with older netscapes.
Galeon 0.12.4 is blocked. It offers to let me download some windows and mac browsers, but nothing that will help on the computer I'm actually using.
MSN seems to work fine for me. I'm using Netscape 4.72 on RedHat Linux 6.2. (I know the software is outdated; it's my local DNS server, give me a break.)
Did Slashdot happen to validate this story before posting it?
Do you like German cars?
Time for galeon/Mozilla et all allow the user to set the user_agent string via the UI.
what a bunch of assholes...
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
This is fucked up. I just successfully went to MSN.com with Netscape 4.72 on Linux but when I tried Mozilla 0.9.4 I got the error message.
I just tried with Opera 5.11 impersonating IE5, and it failed.
It's a good thing that other browsers let you manipulate the user-agent string and trick stupid sites like this into believing that you're using IE. Of course that won't help the majority of users who don't know about features like that, but at least the option is there.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Seems like M$ is taking a lot of liberty, hiding behind the current crisis our world is facing. Shouln't something be done about this? This is purely insane, Bill Gates is a terrorist, he needs to be stripped of his citzenship and deported to Afganistan, after which we'd bomb his trainning camps in Seattle and Afganistan. I swear, this has pissed me off more than it pissed me off the last few days.
On another thought, kerneli.org is no longer around, apparently, the current crazyness in regard to crypto and US has forced them to close down, which means, Linux people wont get crypto anytime soon?
Confirmed on Moz 0.94! Says I have to upgrade to IE for Windows or Mac, or MSN Explorer for Windows.
I think this is great news. It means Microsoft is leaving the web and going their own way. Whatever it is they've got over there, by definition it isn't the web if it can't be viewed with a generic web browser.
Good luck to them on their new venture, whatever it is, and happy to have them out of the way on standards issues now that they've left the web to the rest of us.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
The workaround is easy : change your user-agent to MSIE. Opera, Links, and most HTTP proxies can do this.
The drawback is that the percentage of clients using IE will increase, even though they are really using Mozilla or other non-IE software.
So statistics will always show a lot of IE, even when AOL will have released AOL 6 with Gecko..
{{.sig}}
The article talks about several bundled things that use MSN (Media Player, etc.). There are also a bunch of games bundled with XP (Internet Checkers, Internet Hearts, etc.) that automatically connect to MSN to play against a random opponent.
There is this windows that pops up first telling you that it has to send some info to the server for you to be able to play, but promising that it will never never never send any personal information out.
Makes you wonder what personal information it is sending out...
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
It's their news site. They can do what they want.
communities.msn.com and search for porn
The guy from Opera in the article said they changed the browserid by 1 char and they were able to access msn.com ok.
So are they blocking specific browserid's or are they blocking everything but a couple specific ones?
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Yep, it works in Netscape 6, but not Mozilla. How *lame*.
In the 1950's, people argued that racism was bad for business against those businesses who didn't serve to African Amercians. Why do I feel like this is the same type of thing going on with MS's treatment of Mozilla users? Screw MS.. I'll just go to Netcape or Yahoo.
d00d
Dumb move in the short term, though. But with them ramping up XP, Passport and
I don't know. I'm not sure if they're shooting themselves in the foot or shouting "Resistance is Futile!"
My guess is long term, the American and European governments will use this as further evidence in any anti-trust cases.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
On my Debian system using Mozilla 0.9.5 I get the error message - but with Netscape 4.77 I can access the page fine.
...the internet
Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive practices? I never thought I'd live to see the day. This can't be happening. There must be a rational explanation. There must be a bug in all those other browsers, or a security vulnerability. Microsoft is only trying to help. I'm sure of it.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Just tried Netscape 4.75 and it was fine. Opera 4.01 did not. Kind of surprised me but here is the message:
Attention: Web Browser Upgrade Required to View MSN.com
If you are seeing this page, we have detected that the browser that you are using will not render MSN.com correctly. Additionally, you'll see the most advanced functionality of MSN.com only with the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or MSN Explorer. If you wish to visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below.
Internet Explorer for Windows
Internet Explorer for Macintosh
MSN Explorer for Windows
©2001 Microsoft Corporation.All rights reserved.Terms of UseAdvertiseTRUSTe Approved Privacy StatementGetNetWise
And how many hours do you suspect until Mozilla has an option to "announce browser to be IE"?
Any way that MS tries to force you to be one browser is futile, because you can just imitate it with another browser.
--
Yes, I'm single.
No, you're probably not my type.
Other people have posted that some versions of Netscape do work. I thought I'd inform everyone that my copy of Opera 5 for Linux does not work.
one thing i can tell you is you got to be free
Not to sound like a dick, but isn't this just as bad as that stupid Microsoft Free Friday Apache mod? Yeah, mod me down, flame me -- whatever.
3 0&mode=thread
Why is it that when the underdog does something dirty it's all right? (Granted, the Apache mod was probably written by an individual [not a corp.], but still...)
For reference: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/02/11422
I have a lot of computers on my network, and I really don't feel like going to each one and changing settings to "impersonate" IE. I also have a box with junkbuster to act as a proxy. Is there any way to change the browser name in the junkbstr.ini? IIRC, junkbuster just blocks the browser name, and sets the http-refer to internet.junkbuster.com.
Anyone out there who's done this?
--
#nohup cat
That's it. Up until now, I thought that Microsoft was sometimes annoying, but, overall, it was harmless. Now, upon being unable to view MSN.com, I have realized that they are actually the unholiest subalterns of doom itself.
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
As much as I may hate this idea, I think we should all run such a mod and forever refuse to serve IE.
IE is hampered in that it can't lie about its UA string like K and Opera can.
This could be looked at as a feature of the Mozilla Browser.
"Mozilla protects you from crap like MSN."
Slate, since its redesign, also doesn't work on my
Mac in Netscape 4.7 or IE 5.1.
Part of the page reders, but most is either gone or garbled.
T
so I wonder if all this /. traffic to MSN will make them think they're getting DoSed.
Even though the fix is easy for any browser to change it's identification. It is nice to know Konqueror has that built in feature w00p.
Konqueror allows you to define the browser type (I forget the variable name) so essentially you can fake an IE browser type. =)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
Hi! How are you? I send you this Debian Potato in order to have your advice.
I'm sure glad I had Mozilla. A mere seven crashes, two freezes and a cookie later, I was able to read some News That Matters.
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]
I'd argue to never, ever do this. Why change your good browser to report that it's a bad browser?
This what's important here: The authors of the site blocking you have decided that you're not important. Fine; nod your head in agreement and take your traffic, ad-viewing eyes, and attention elsewhere. Don't even tell them or complain; let them die of natural selection.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Once again Microsoft is trying its best to drive all but its most fanatically loyal customers away.... *sigh*
It doesn't look like anything nefarious on MSN's part, just sloppy browser-specific web coding, as sites like Disney, Time Warner, and the USDOE FAFSA have done in the past.
In konqueror:
:)
Settings->Configure Konqueror->User Agent
Simply add a new "Site/domain specific identification".
For example, I added ".msn.com" as the domain, and used "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)" as the user agent.
Voila! I can see msn.com again! Not that it is anything spectacular to look at, but if you MUST check the site out, this works well.
Konqueror 2.2.1 works great (more or less, for a MS site), if you change the user agent setting to something with "Internet Explorer" in it. It's all in the "Extras"-menu.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Any company that carries out these kind of practices (specifically actively locking certain browsers), isn't worthy of having business done with them.
.NET that will require .NET developers to deny access to their sites to "certain" browsers.
Oh, but when you have a monopoly people won't be able to avoid it. For MSN it truly isn't that big of a deal. But what about the future change to the EULA for
This is exactly the kind of anti-competitive behavior that got MS into antitrust trouble over Netscape in the first place. Sometimes I wonder whether they just like baiting to USgov to see how much they can get away with -- or is it just that they are so arrogant they think no one will ever figure it out?
Uh... does anyone who actually wants to go to msn.com even know that there is anything other than IE?
FYI, my NS4.7x works, Opera doesn't, even with id set to IE5. Go figure.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
Microsoft seems to have forgotten the "World-Wide" part of the WWW. It still pisses me off. Not because I give a rat's ass about MSN, but because so many have forgotten the whole point of the web in the first place.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
That netscape STILL has the worst browser available on the market - sloppy interface design, incomplete W3C standards adherence, BLOAT, etc.. If I were webmaster of the world I would ban Navigator too. As for the other browsers, are they W3C compliant? No? then sod off. Yes? Then come on in...
For the record, I'm using FreeBSD with Konqueror and Mozilla.
Try clicking those links at the bottom of the page. You can't get to ``Terms of Use,'' but ``Advertise'' works just fine.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
iCab works if it identifies as IE. It may be caching, but it also works if it identifies as iCab. Must be a bug in MSN's blocker logic.
So far I've confirmed that Opera (as stated in the article) for OS X is shut out as well as Mozilla. But other (less used) browsers like OmniWeb and iCab (for Mac OS X) will be let through even though these browsers don't support the features that Opera & Mozilla do. Maybe they just want to shut out all the most popular non-Micro$oft browsers. Sounds a little fishy to me.
--
www.kuwan.net
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
seems to be just the main www.msn.com and not the subdomains i tried..
Opera 5.11 on Windows 98:
In Opera's prefs, you can set it to identify itself as another browser, but you still get the same results when trying to go to msn.com. So they're doing something special to identify the browser besides just the http header info.
If you go to any place within MSN, everything works fine, and you don't get the lockout message.
If you go to msn.com with IE and view the source, you will notice that there is NOTHING in there that is IE specific code.
They're really using their touch. Most of their attempts at deceit are this obvious.
In fact when I save the source of the page served up to my Mac IE here, I can see that it's pretty bog-standard XHTML but otherwise nothing special. So much for MSN.com needing a "browser upgrade".
I know this is off topic, but I was wondering how do sites like msn zdnet and /. make an icon that displays next to the location in konqueror?
I gotta say, this is going too far... The legality of this move must be VERY suspect. I must disclaim here that I use Windows and IE, but fuck me if I agree with this manouvuer of theirs. Their generally shady buisness practices are sell known and never really affected the general public untill this...
To those who already posted that they 'got in' with Netscape, the article did say that only some versions were affected... Don't make me say it...
Ensuing flame war (enable asbestos monitor) aside, can this sort of activity be gotten away with? Is this legal? It's certainly one thing to corner a market, but locking non-MS browsers out of MSN and making such a wild claim as it won't render properly is a whole new level, even for MS. Can those out there actually qualified to give me an answer please do so? Those who just want to pontificate, you'll just be preaching to the quoir with me.
You gotta hand it to them, they really done it this time. Now, where did I put my RedHat boot CD..?
Sham on
Slashdot msn.com with Mozilla/"incompatible" browsers, and see if MS backs down when they see the number of Mozilla hits suddenly jump up!
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
look at thisscreenshot It renders perfectly in konqueror, this is clearly yet another abuse of their monopoly... not a very big deal anyways, it's not like i frequent any of their sites. Btw, www.zone.com also seems to be doing it, which did at one time fully support netscape.
Now that espn.com is under the msn.com umbrella, what does this mean for non-IE viewers of espn.com?
The revolution will be televised. Blackout restrictions apply.
I`ve seen this kind of thing appening to me on different website of the microsoft domain since some time now. I`m using Opera 5.11 under Win2k and it seem that the guys at Opera software tought of that befor microsft this time preparing a litlle feature that enable you to idenify your opera browser as IE5 .. or NS whatever ... just about nything .. it can even identify himself as lynx ; And the most amusing thing of this it`s that if Opera pretend to be IE5.5all the msn pages work perfectly ... and display the same way as under IE . I really think that MSN blocking other browser is a stupid trick out again from there old hat . But personaly thanks to this sweet browser i don`t even care ;)
"We are sorry but because we don't like your (Insert Below Variable Here) we won't be serving you."
Here are some choice examples...
Operating System
Computer Architecture
Web Browser
Political Choice
Skin color
National Origin
Religous Choice
Opinion on the Law
Aren't there laws about discrimination in the US? Oh, wait this is a corporation. They aren't subject to obeying the law anymore.
This is discrimination plain and simple. Sure, it doesn't look to much like that if you are only thinking about such an unimportant thing as a web browser.
--
.sig seperator
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Remember, corporations are creations of the
state. Unlike humans, they don't have rights.
Therefore, dealing with them is a matter of
pragmatism, not commonsense morals/ethics.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Maybe there's a reason for a non-Windows/IE person to go to MSN, but as far as I know, all of those articles are available on MSNBC.com. Insofar as I can tell, it works fine.
So what? Microsoft has a stupid proprietary browser and a stupid proprietary site. We already knew this. That's their problem. When a site that actually does something usefull for non-Microsoft users becomes completely IE-dependant, then I'll be annoyed.
But bitching about Windows Update not working under Mozilla/X/Linux? That's daft. No one complains about the fact that their local Ford dealership doesn't carry all the parts to fix your Saturn. Sure, it's icky what they're doing to the HTML standard, but c'mon.
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
I can't wait to get home so I can access it with OS X or PPC/Linux :)
--
Well... I really don't blame microsoft for blocking mozilla actually. The browser is really plagued with bugs. I used mozilla for a good 4 hours before I got fed up with all the errors and pages that didn't load correctly. I would gladly use IE over mozilla any day...
It's the Microsoft site, I don't intend to go there, what browsers they accept there doesn't bother me. Other sites might, but not MS (nor MSN or Hotmail).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You need to use AOL's browser to use AOL!
Best Slashdot Co
If you try to log on to Apple's iTools [www.apple.com] using a PC, the website tells you that you can only access the site using a Mac.
Mostly I'm just tired of all the plugins that these websites require -- for meaningless intro graphics.
When is IE coming out for Linux. Yahoo says that they have versions for all other operating systems. I want to be assimilated.
And moreover, why should they care? Microsoft has a massively overwhelming majority of installed clients. Microsoft dosen't care, because - suprise! - they won the browser war. They won it a long time ago. The minority using non-MS browsers is irrelevant to them. If they want their web site to not support anything but their product, that's their business. msn.com sucks anyway.
Mozilla, incidentally, helped this along by taking so bloody long to release a 1.0 browser. (When's 1.0 scheduled for, anyway?)
--riney
I do not know the rationale behind the decision, but I cannot blame them.
It costs a lot of money to build a website. Even more, if you have to build the website to render correctly in all browsers.
Now that Internet Explorer has emerged as the browser of use for most consumers, it makes since for a company to build their webpages to only support Internet Explorer. If another browser can comprimise the quality of the site, it also makes since to inform the user to upgrade to the proper browser rather than risk having your site displayed incorrectly.
I think you will begin to see more and more web owners follow this trend. If a site caters to another class of users that demographically prefer free browsers than they will not follow this lead. However, most business's will go with the dominant browser, particulary if that browser involved an investment from the consumer. A business wants to attract people willing to spend money.
Could anyone else confirm this?
Do or do not, there is no try -Yoda
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Microsoft can do whatever the hell they want with their sites. Just like if I make a webpage I can block IE browsers if I want.
There's only a problem if they try to force people to block non-IE browsers (for example, forcing the code to be inserted into Frontpage docs, etc)
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
OmniWeb works. So of the browsers I've tested and posted as replies here, only the Mozilla derived one failed. iCab and OmniWeb are both independent code bases.
if a company dominates the browser market, it's only a matter of time before they attempt to use their installed client base (browsers) as leverage to control the server market.
That said, the site renders perfectly in NS6.1.. better than IE, even -- the font isn't TINY.
Nescape 4.x works under IRIX.
Mozilla does not.
Should I be waiting for the IRIX port of IE?
They must really hate mozilla.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
This is a particularly stupid idea by msn considering that this is the main portal a lot of people go to in order to get to major websites, including msnbc. While I haven't checked out whether MSNBC still works with Opera or Mozilla, it appears to me that not allowing people to view your website based upon their browser will only decrease your viewer base. If MS wants to get good publicity for all of their web initiatives, it would only make sense to try to get the word out to everyone. This includes people with other browser software besides IE.
This is one of those blatant attempts at controlling a user's desktop that even the office secretary will be pissed off by this...provided that he/she is not currently using IE.
Anyways, I'm curious as to if it will stay closed to other browsers or if pressure will force them to change it.
MS-passport which Microsoft wants to be *the*
.NET Passport"
u re/
authentication mechanism of the whole Internet
does not allow to edit your account-details
if you use Konqueror or Mozilla.
Of yourse that's only because all other browsers
(besides MS IE) are soooo insecure and soooo
incompatible with the advanced features you need
to display some simple web-form....
How to reproduce:
- Visit www.passport.com
- Click the "Sign In" button on the upper right
- Enter your email-address and password
- Click on "Edit the information in your
You will see one of those if you use Mozilla or Konq.
http://e3serv0.hedonism.cx/~chris/mspassport_fail
That's just dumb.
Can you believe this! Why go through the
effort to block both of these browsers?
A few weeks back, a friend tried to access his Hotmail account while I had Linux/Mozilla .9.4 booted on my PC, and it wouldn't work then either. (Had to reboot to the Windows partition)
They and just about any other site that tried to do something other than straight text-and-jpg HTML. The fact is that Netscape browsers were buggy pieces of trash. A browser should not crash, no matter how messed up the content it receives. Period.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Why are you trying to go to MSN sites anyways? All it is is Microsoft propaganga, coated with a thick layer of privacy stealing passport authentication. Anything you want to get from MSN you can get from Yahoo, including email, news, stock quotes, etc. And no M$ or Passport bullshit, not to mention that Yahoo pages are and always have been perectly compatable with ANY browser (even Lynx), cause they never fell into all the DHTML crap. And they actually have a GOOD search engine (Google)
MSN is one of the biggest 'comercial wastelands' on the internet today. It's almost completly worthless for anything other then the kind of brainless fluff they show on network TV and AOL. Nothing but stcok prices and lame, uncontravercial news.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I set my fonts on small, and at MSN they are ULTRA TINY
But they look fine on 'MEDIUM'
But when I go to SLASDOT they are like 16pt! god dammn is there no sanity!!!
Konqueror: Agent Changing Stance!
MSN: UNH! (coughs up blood)
Konqueror: Your Fu is crap.
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
Opera 5 which pretty much outputs the same thing as IE can't get in NS is ok... but Mozilla... built on the same engine is not working... OK if your strategy is to make your propaganda less accessable then go ahead... We've just got to make sure their new customers find alternatives in better software. IE is a good browser... but from now on no site I develop will ever suggest Internet Explorer as a good choice for viewing my work. What else can we do?
JCHere's a thought.
I sorta like what I saw in Konqueror not too long ago, the ability to present yourself to a server using several different browser identities.
This should be a standard feature of ALL browsers.
Prefaced, of course, with a little pop-up disclaimer stating that the subsequent content may not be displayed correctly, or securely.
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running..
Bowie J. Poag
I'm using Build 2001101117 on W2K and getting into Hotmail fine. Just for laughs I also tried MSNBC which works also.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
...had Microsoft actually INCLUDED those "advanced features"
that apparently can't be rendered without Internet Explorer.
The only feature I see is the brand new FisherPrice interface.
Someone needs to inform Microsoft that we are not third graders.
r0wan
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
If you must visit MSN with your Linux/Mozilla browser, you can get in by adding the following line to your junkbuster config file:
user-agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0)
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
hmmm...do you have the psm security package for mozilla installed???
I've logged into hotmail with moz 0.95 and had no problems.
ROME - In a new development shocking faithful and infidels alike, Pope John Paul II was revealed to be a Roman Catholic. CNN broke the story shortly after noon Thursday, after an anonymous tip from a recently-excommunicated parishoner was verified by reluctant officials at the Vatican. One such official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said "Yes, I mean, it's true in the technical sense that the His Holiness is, in point of fact, Catholic." The news sparked violent protests among disillusioned churchgoers around the world. One protester in Brasilia said, "Jesus Fucking Christ, man, the Pope is Catholic? I mean, what's next, Microsoft engaging in anticompetitive business practices? I'm so disillusioned." He then proceeded to overturn and set fire to a police car.
Mozilla is more than capable of handling any standards compliant markup you throw at it so the whole thing stinks of anti-competitive behaviour.
Much though I don't like this, I have to say it has one positive benefit - I don't have to look at their stinky site or inadvertantly make them money by clicking on one of the adverts. I wonder what all their advertisers think of all this?
but if I set it to look like windows/ie 5.5, with: /apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent --type=string "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)"
gconftool -s
I'm fine. btw, you can set it back to the default with: /apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent --type=string default
gconftool -s
.....
.<O..
.(M\.
..X..
8===D
Adopt a penis bird lately?
If I can't see it in Lynx I'm not interested.
www.msn.fr let Galeon in it. :)
But I escaped soon as there's nothing interesting for me
There is a page that tells you your browser isn't totally supported but you can still click to continue.
It's just a way of increasing hits. None of us linux users ever went anywhere near MSN. Now we're all trying to get in!
It should be easy to get around this... like Tetzchner said, you just have to change one character in the user-agent header to break MS's lockout mechanism. I've never used Opera myself; is the functionality to change the user-agent string built into the browser? If not, it wouldn't be hard to build a simple HTTP proxy that would munge the header for you.
A couple things of note: The first is that I received the "upgrade to IE" page when I ran msn.com through my Java HTTP header utility (Sun's Java, by default, has a user-agent string of something like "Java1.3.1_01"). This means that MSN might be breaking a lot of non-browser spiders, robots, and page scrapers out there.
My second note is that the content of msn.com (both the upgrade page and the real page) is now written in XHTML (a version of HTML that conforms to XML specifications). My guess is that this is Microsoft's justification for forcing people to "upgrade" to IE6... they want their users to be using an XHTML-compliant browser.
No love lost.
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
I used IE's "Save As" feature and saved a copy of the MSN homepage to my hard drive and then viewed it with different browsers to see what Microsoft's problem is:
.Net looks like. Perhaps we'll all have to be running IEXP in order to access the internet in the near future.
Opera: looked fine.
Navigator 4.08: Strange... no background colors.
Netscape 6.1: fine, some incorrect spacing
Microsoft MSNWebTV: Looks fine. Fonts are large.
It didn't get any javascript errors in any of the browsers... So what's the issue with allowing access to non-IE browsers?
I guess this is how their development department deals with complaints concerning their website not meeting web standards. I wonder what their vision of the openess of
Just another step into booting all the non-MS users off of Qwest DSL.
Or MS is trying to get a ratings jump by having everyone switch their browsers user agent to IE. Then Gartner or some group will show that IE is the consumers choice of web interface. Duh...
Microsoft is boldly saying "We want to run the Internet. Standards mean nothing except when its our standard."
I think all CS and IT people should strongly oppose this company both from the standpoint of the quality of it's engineering, and it's abysmal ethics and vision. Unix represents the best way (including Linux, *BSD and MacOS X) to fight back, and there are excellent rationales for doing so.
This is probably the best chance alternatives will ever have...let's hope they make the most of it. The reviews of RH 7.2 are an encouraging start at least!
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I remember a few years back when Microsoft bought the Internet Gaming Zone site, it suddenly stopped accepting the Netscape browser as a client. It took many moons before MS let Netscape people back in by 'fixing it', but by then, I'm sure anyone really interested in the site had gone and installed IE to view it.
Embrace...extend...extinguish...
Not in my bloody lifetime (that is 70-90 years buddy).
Microsoft has to realise that maybe there are a few million Unix users who use Netscape/Moz/Opera (even though Opera along with Konq can mask themselves as Microsoft IE) because Microsoft only serves their browser to Mac OS X, HP-UX and Sun Solaris, and not BSD, Linux, or some other form of Unix.
I do use Linux as a desktop OS quite frequently and I'd rather use Netscape over Opera at times as I do not want to deal with banners and such, but since Microsoft has decided to use such monopolistic tactics (where is the DOJ right now?), that means I have use Opera or Konq.
Do we see car companies making it so you can only buy a certain brand of gasoline? No... so why do we need a company telling us what specific browser do we have to use?
I agree that this segments Microsoft off, which is good. But (looking into the future) cat then take critical-mass with them and wipe out the internet?
/. had spellcheck.
I love conspirac...I wish
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Funny that the page will render incorreclty on a browser that displays all standards compliant HTML properly (Opera, etc.) Get with the times, Microsoft, and stop trying to make your own little standards on the internet.
I can't think of why outdated, old NS 4.77 can "render the page correctly" and the newer Mozilla and Konqueror can't
Perhaps if they block NS 4.77, they would also have to block IE3.2 which is the last 16 bit browser for Windows 3.11? Or possibly even a later explorer, like IE 4.0 -- it's only been recent when IE Explorer has reported being something other than Mozilla.
I know when I'm writing web content, I try very hard to make it as difficult as possible to view my web pages. With bandwidth so expensive these days, who can afford a million hits on their website every day? I hadn't thought of this trick yet... perhaps if I prohibit ALL browsers, I won't get any traffic and I can finally stop updating my website every day!
But seriously folks...
Perhaps the Open Source community (and Slashdot) can respond by prohibiting IE users from viewing Slashdot, high-traffic Linux sites, and Google? That'll show 'em!
- binarybum -
This has nothing to do with anti-M$ sentiment... the site is just such a worthless piece of shit.
But speaking of M$ manipulations, for weeks or months now Hotmail has been "cripple-wared" for Mozilla users - you get a click-through delay page saying it won't render properly. It appears, oddly, that this has been removed. Calm before the storm? If M$ will make their main portal IE-only, what's to stop them from doing the same with Hotmail?
... you tell me if mozilla can't display it:
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I've been unable to login to my hotmail with [insert random non-IE browser], but found out that links was actually doing fine! Unfortunately, not possible anymore. :( And I was positive that console-mode-brosers was the key. *sigh*
[insert random fortune here]
Here's to hoping Bill Gates gets a letter thinly veiled in a white powdery substance with a return address to a 4th grade elementary school that doesn't exist....
...MSN's script fails to parse Opera's default user-agent string and generates an ASP script error. That's why changing 1 char allows you to use Opera.
IE 5 and Netscape 4 work just fine... obviously the script that does this uses a simple if...else structure that discards browsers other than IE 5+ and Netscape 4+. I don't think they are singling out Mozilla for no reason... but I guess that's enough to throw the Linux Zealots into an uproar.
Am I blocking too many cookies (junkbuster)? Not spreading my legs enough for javascript or activeX? Guess I'll never know.
Fuck anyone who tells me I have to upgrade my browser for the privilege of entering their site. I can understand needing Flash to view Flash, etc. etc. But your front page should be straight HTML.
Ghost of Sam
Why would I want to visit MSN anyway?
Translation: MS is lying to users. Not that this is the first time they've done it, but I guess it just goes to show that they're up to their old tricks.
If this isn't anti-competitive, I don't know what is.
Everyone breate deeply, and point their Windows-based Netscape browser to www.msn.com. No errors whatsoever for me. Try it before you panic.
Lynx on Linux gets the, "Web Browser Upgrade," page!
Just thought you should know!
----------
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
Why don't the just make sure that the USER_AGENT strings read exaclty what IE's reads. They seem to just be blocking specific other browsers.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
If I go to www.msn.com with Opera, I get the error.
If I get the url of another page on MSN and put it in opera, it works just fine. The page layout is the same between both pages, so saying that it's due to the way other browsers render is total nonsense.
I had a user call me today, said he hated the way MSN looks now and wanted me to change it back.
I told his that Microsoft is trying to alienate as much people as possible.
Press any key to continue, any other key to quit.
from Linux oriented sites blocking IE users? I've encountered this several times when trying to access them from workstations at work. End result? I don't revisit those sites as I don't want someone telling me what browser to use. Period.
If we kick and scream about Microsoft doing it, then we need to make sure that we aren't playing the same game.
RD
I just tried it and it does not seem be true... But perhaps he changed the user-agent or something.
:) Good software designers test everything.
Just because you shouldn't do something is no reason to not do something.
Anyways I think the author thought he was being funny but he doesn't seem to realise that this is exactly the type of thing that Microsoft loves to do. They have far too much time on their hands so they try to make life miserable for people.
I seem to remember that one couldn't get in to the Netscape developers area with a Netscapre browser... Tit for tat ?
#voxlator
well, in the cnet articlehere MS says that they're only blocking "browser[s that don't] support the latest XHTML standard". Yay.
Same here. Not that I want to view Microsoft stuff.
Most sites track browsers that access their sites so that they can tailor their content/features to take advnatage of diferent browsers. It's better than the old "This site best viewd with something other than lynx"
I sugest this:
Change your user agent strings so that all your browsers report "F*#$k Micro$oft"
Granted - you wont get the pop-under adds that have been tailored to your particular socio-economic cross section - but it would be nice to see that pop up in a web trends report.
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
JavaScript required. The browser that you are using does not support JavaScript, or you may have disabled JavaScript.
[...snipped..]
Are you using a browser that doesn't support JavaScript?
If your browser does not support JavaScript, you can upgrade to a newer browser, such as Internet Explorer 5.
Do you have JavaScript disabled?
If you have JavaScript disabled, you must enable JavaScript to sign in. Instructions are listed below.
it then gives instructions for how to turn JS on for IE, and then...
Other browsers
To see if your browser supports JavaScript, and for detailed instructions about how to enable this feature, see the online Help for your browser.
And YES... I DO browse with JavaScript turned on.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
Get a copy of Internet Explorer, install it and return to the site. If necessary, buy a copy of windows so you can install Internet Explorer.
I don't think its fair to complain about Microsoft's free services, if you aren't a patron of Microsoft.
lynx -useragent="Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.8 sun4u)" http://www.msn.com/
Furthermore, MSN never looked better! Few graphics, no CSS-font-enlargment, not even a white background. It looks positively old-school, if you ask me. Unfortunately, the rest of the site is just as bloated as usual.
This does not work:
lynx http://www.msn.com/
This gets me the upgrade-your-browser page. After some more investigation, I find that the minimal User-Agent string needed to get the minimal MSN home page, is: "Mozilla/4.7". "Mozilla" alone does not work, nor does "Mozilla/4" or "Mozilla/4.1". But any string like "Mozilla/4.$x" where $x -gt 4, works fine. You can include the additional User-Agent components if you like, but they do not seem to matter.
Edith Keeler Must Die
In fact, many laws and judicial decisions
were passed because corporations were assumed
to have rights. They are treated as individuals
under the law. So you can treat them with
morals/ethics.
Uh oh, now you're circumventing an access control mechanism, it's off to the big house with you!
Read a post up that said Mozilla didn't display the page properly. So I thought to myself, maybe MS isn't being bad and maybe they are just blocking browsers that don't work real well with their site. Fired up proxomitron, fed it a "Microsoft approved" user agent and Opera displayed the page fine. I haven't dug into it to see if all the scripts work, but it seems to display fine.
They probably think they are doing the world a favor by pointing out the "problems" with other browsers. What a bunch of a**h***s.
Why do people still think they are cool ? As a corporation they are almost as unethical as Nike
The feature story on Yahoo tomorrow, of course, will be "Oh, we were just joking about the MSN not letting in other web browsers"
It will be shown tomorrow that a not-identified Yahoo executve bet Microsoft's Bill Gates 1 dollar that he could triple the page views of MSN.COM while pissing off the open source crew. Bill Gates, of course [one never to forego a challenge] took this bet. Commenting on the way things turned out, Bill said "Well, you win some, you lose some... this, though, was the most entertainment I got for a buck"
Back to you, john...
the point is not being able to work around it -- the point is that microsoft is trying to own the internet. this is the first step of what everyone has seen coming. is it a coincidence that xp shipped today? i doubt it.
now is the time that we are getting the solid ammo to point out to everyone we know that microsoft is trying to control the web. we've been telling friends and family for years, but they pooh-poohed us. now they are starting to do it, and we can show people proof. so show them.
go get it
Don't let your browser look like IE just to access blocked MSN pages, It would only give them longer IE users logs to strengthen their "everybody uses MS software" and "we are the standard" point.
IMO the only way to fight that dirty practice is to stop going to their pages NOW!
Taco and crew, please, stop linking MSN articles in Slashdot. Point to Google caches instead, or find other ways.
We're sorry, we can't show you any of our hot, steamy pr0n, because you've misconfigured your PC to run a buggy, bloated OS.
Please install Linux and come back later.
And in other news, MS abandoned by millions of users, citing "buggy, bloated" code
Um, you guys are falling for it.
This is a stunt. MS will relent within a week or two. They're doing this to drum up more PR for the XP release. It keeps their names in the headlines.
Bad publicity is better than no publicity.
A week, maybe two weeks from now (probably after the XBOX) they'll relent, redesign the MSN site slightly, and allow all browsers access.
Who said anything about Windows Update? Ever been to msn.com? It's not a Windows-software-update site. That's elsewhere, namely www.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/. Well, it used to be at least. I get a "No web site is configured at this address." error message now. Perhaps this -is- becuase I'm using Mozilla... but I don't care.
Quick, let's all make the MSN server Slashdotted and force it to run that anti-Mozilla script until it does a backflip faceplant. :-)
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
Running IE 5.5 under Win98SE on my machine here at work, and it's cutting off the beginning of the headlines in the middle of the page.
Also, my attempts at messing with the user agent have been unable to work, although I will note that saving the page and then opening it with mozilla 0.9.4 it looks just fine to me.
We're all full up on Crazy here...
I checked the following browsers:
IE 5.50 - worked
NS 4.77 - worked
NS 6.01 - worked
NS 6.01a on Solaris 2.8 for Intel - worked
Opera 5.12 - did not work no matter what browser I set it as.
I'm sorry, I did not have my box available that has Mozilla loaded. I hope you figure out what your problem is (outside of known problems that MS has).
"I want to know God's thoughts...The rest are details." Albert Einstein
I tried this under solaris and here are my results:
- Netscape 4.7 renders the page correctly.
- Mozilla gets the upgrade message.
- Opera gets the upgrade message even when I changed the user agent string. Maybe some sort of ip caching?
On the bright side this will just make more users find better homepages.
I tried www.msn.fr and the page displayed fine even though that page has also been redesigned to use the new XP look and feel. I guess M$ doesn't want to piss off the French anymore than they have to.
Sometimes I feel like a nut... Ok so it's most of the time
I just don't get them... MS is in an anti-trust case against them for leveraging thier monopoly to take over the browser market and now they do this?!? What are they thinking of ... I just hope the DOJ don't miss this. I would have thought they would have been timid with anything close to this kind of stuff until AFTER the court case is over.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Come on, folks. Netscape 4.7x is 1998 technology. You're better off using a new, real browser anyway (be it IE 5.x or Mozilla). There are SO many things Netscape 4 can't do; it's a wonder people still use that hulking pile of garbage. I really hope more sites start restricting access to it so I don't have to develop for it anymore.
In short: Upgrade your browser to something made this century.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
OK, this is an evil thing to say, but I am really disgusted by this episode.
I think it is time for Microsoft to pitch in for thr war against terrorism. It's time to bomb Afghanistan with Bill Gates. That's right, take Bill Gates in an airplane, and drop him on Kabul. If the published tales about his personal hygiene are credible, this would also constitute an effective biological-warfare response to the anthrax attacks on this country.
Alternatively, for those of you like myself who hesitate about using biological weapons, even against villains like the Taliban (yeah, ok, dropping Bill Gates out of an airplane might be excessive as well), I have another proposal:
When we do finally capture bin Laden we should force him to sit in a room and have Bill Gates explain, in that whiny, grating voice of his, how Microsoft is not a monopoly ("Well, it depends on how you define 'is'"). Surely, this torture would be enough to drive the man mad.
evanchik.net
Taken from the Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/22441.html
based on the beta site:
http://beta.msn.com
IE 3 : Upgrade needed
IE 4 : OK
IE 5+ : OK
Netscape 4.x : Upgrade needed*
Netscape 6.x : OK
Mozilla 0.9.5 : Upgrade needed
Opera 5 : Upgrade needed
Konqueror 2.1 : Upgrade needed
* Crashes reported on version 4.61.
http://www.msn.com.br
IE 3 : Upgrade needed
IE 4 : OK
IE 5+ : OK
Netscape 4.x : Upgrade needed
Netscape 6.x : OK
Mozilla 0.9.5 : OK
Opera 5 : ASP error
Konqueror 2.1 : OK
[Please type your sig here.]
Microsoft uses its omnipresence to further its monopoly by doing things like this. That's why I'm fully boycotting Microsoft. My computers run only Linux, I don't visit msnbc.com, msn.com, slate.com, etc. And I won't even watch MSNBC TV. It's a lot of work, but I think it's sending a message to the people around me. Whenever someone asks why, it gives me a chance to explain all about Microsoft's unfair (even immoral) business practices.
Hotmail has given me this error message with Opera for several weeks now:
With a button to continue using Hotmail anyway...
If I tell Opera to lie about its identity everything works except for some silly JavaScript-based navigation. This lie, however, does not work with the new improved (yeah, right...) MSN, which Hotmail automatically directs you to after you log out.
My system at work runs an antiquated version of Netscape (4.7, under Solaris 8), and it crashes on the new improved MSN page.
Ain't technology wonderful?
...laura
Netscape 6.1 works with no problem. Mozilla 0.9.something does not.
I would infer from this that this is the result of an overzealous web master trying to limit the number of platforms he has to develop for, rather than a flat-out effort to funnel all traffic to IE - although the selection of links on that "upgrade" page certainly seems to indicate that they don't mind giving MSIE a boost.
The helpdesk for MSN -
http://www.msn.com/help/form.asp
Returns the following Error:
Sorry, the page you're trying to reach is temporarily unavailable or the page may no longer exist.
IMHO, this is so they can say they didn't receive any complaints...
Press any key to continue, any other key to quit.
Detect if your are running IE and redirect you to a Mozilla download page. Most people will download it just to get in here.
Don't have access to one of these myself so I can't test it but I suspect that any old IE would be able to access the site cleanly.
If so, then they are plainly spewing shit by claiming that it's all about rendering the page properly.
the dillo browser also isn't let in, so I guess its not specific blocking after all?
Sure, it stinks to high heaven like a typically corrupt monopolist move (but they wouldn't do that would they?), and consider how ISP's have been switching over to MSN as their default portal for users, this would be an error. Right? Yes, just like putting the fox in the hen house and nailing the door shut. You can count on him to look after the best interest of the chickens.
This alleged ongoing effort to lock people into everything Microsoft would be an open admission that their software and systems are so bad that they can't sell on their own merits. But they wouldn't do these things, thus admitting to that, would they?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This tactic is more like one kid not allowing another to come to their birthday party because the uninvited kid isn't popular enough. Really, it's quite childish behaviour
If iCab (a Mac browser) identifies itself as such, the "error" page described loads. If iCab claims to be MSIE 5.0, then the page loads just fine. I hear the same goes for Opera. Easy to work around, but the average user won't bother.
Maybe it's time for the 'rest of us' to make it just as easy for Microsoft Browsers to view our websites as they are making it for others.... Anybody know a nice bit of code I can stick in my home page that redirects people to download a browser other than Internet Explorer?
A friend of mine asked me why Moz couldn't see the msn beta site yesterday (I'm an ASP/MS-SQL 2k developers, so I guess it's the company I keep), and I answered him the best way I knew how. I sent him the source to the page.
Later, I was moving mail from my Sent box in NS 4.7 (we're mandated to use 4.7 as our email client here at work; it's not a bad app at all), and after deleting a few, the email I'd sent to Linuxman came up. NS 4.7 renders html attachments to emails after a quick hr tag in the window, so there it was, the MSN beta site's home page -- iamges and everything short of stylesheets.
Not a dang thing didn't work. (Going to msn.com straight from NS 4.7 locks me up so I have to force quit)
If you're a web coder, you know the difference between checking DOM (if (document.getElementById()) {) vs. checking the user-agent, as mentioned in another post. This is plain ole bad code -- and an "oversite" that shows MS is once again abusing its near monopoly status in home OS, and now its near monopoly in browsers, to try and achieve another near-monopoly in servers.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
...because I beat them to it!
The Internet JUNKBUSTER Proxy (http://internet.junkbuster.com) intercepted the request for www.msn.com/ because the URL matches the following pattern in the blockfile: www.msn.com
i got REALLY tired of being redirected there after checking my (once upon a time NON-MS) hotmail account.
Oddly enough, it's Opera 3.62. It displays the page poorly, but it does get into MSN.com. It ID's itself as Mozilla, too (not sure which version). However, Mozilla, Lynx, and Net+ are barred from entry...
This sort of thing has been getting worse for a long time now, though. How many of you had problems over the past year accessing Hotmail with anything but a the "latest and greatest" Microsoft browser?
***
Why don't we all email M$ and complain? theres thousands of slashdot users! sure it prolly wouldn't work but it might make for a good slashdot story ;)
Snoozer.
telling konqueror to lie about its User Agent causes the page to render correctly save the background which is the wrong color.
I think you got a slight grammer problem there. Are you saying that the background color is wrong under Konqueror?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
We already knew that their software is lobotomized, so I am not at all surprised that their webmonkeys can be outwitted by an asparus.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
You do not have permission to access this site with any Microsoft technology. None.
Of course it's just a lawyer stating you don't have permission. It is not programmed to block Msft products. I'll bet Billg browses it everyday while thumbing his nose in their general direction.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I don't have any use for the msn site anyway, why should I care that they are locking out browsers?
Remember Lexington Green!
Open the page in IE (I used 5.5) and save the page as "Web Page Complete" on your drive.
Now simply load the page in mozilla from your hard drive. It rendered ok in mozilla 0.9.5 for me except the text started about halfway down the screen.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
.... it looks simply dreadful! Lets hear it for the cultureless zoids from Redmond. They want nothing more than complete homogenized lameness for everyone.
Really makes me wonder how they featured Bjork so heavily on their media player page. She seems such the opposite of the world vision they are forcing on us.
related note: I have been installing slack on a 486 notebook, and from the other room I keep hearing the Madonna XP ads that from an audio standpoint seem to be suggesting some sort of incredible sense of freedom to be eXPerienced from the new product. Everytime I heard that ad from the other room I just reflected on the freedom I had with the slack install on my little notebook.
Heres to freedom!
I just sent an email to webmaster@msn.com and got back an interesting reply... note where I should go for problems with msn.com ;o)
p ?ID=FH;EN-US;gmz.
p ?ID=FH;EN-US;mnyc&SD=GN&FR=0&LN=EN-US.
c =1033.
--- Original Message ---
From: qhack@mmcable.com
To: webmaster@msn.com
Sent: Oct 25 2001 11:49AM
Subject: Cant see webpage
I hope this is just a mistake and not a perminate thing. I use the Mozilla web browser and can no longer view the MSN website. I have no wish to use Microsoft products but do find the MSN websit to be informative.
Hope you fix this problem,
Q-Hack!
--------------------
Thank you for your e-mail message to MSN webmaster. We would like to assist you with your question and request you go to the appropriate link below for the product you are inquiring about. The link will take you directly to that product?s online help with instructions on how you may contact us directly. This will provide you the timeliest response.
For MSN Internet Access, go to http://supportservices.msn.com/us/help.asp.
For Hotmail, go to http://www.hotmail.com, then click ?Help? on the upper middle part of your screen.
For MSN Messenger, go to http://messenger.microsoft.com, select the applicable Messenger client on the left navigation bar, then click "Help."
For MSN Gaming Zone, go to http://support.microsoft.com/directory/content.as
For MSN MoneyCentral, go to http://support.microsoft.com/directory/content.as
For Microsoft Passport, go to http://www.passport.com/Consumer/ConsumerQA.asp?l
For Microsoft software applications such as Office or Windows, go to http://support.microsoft.com/directory/.
For MSN Web Communities, Member Directory or support for files you have saved to MSN, go to http://communities.msn.com/home, then click ?Help? on the upper middle part of your screen.
For MSN Chat, go to http://chat.msn.com/default.msnw, then click ?Help? on the upper middle part of your screen.
For bCentral, go to http://www.bcentral.com/help/overview.asp.
For MSNBC, go to http://www.msnbc.com/m/info/help.asp.
For help with MSN.com, MSN Search or any other MSN property not mentioned above, go to http://www.msn.com, then click ?Help? on the upper right-hand part of your screen.
This is an unmonitored e-mail address so please be sure to go to one of the links above.
We value your business and thank you for using the Microsoft network of web sites.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Want to see if we can do something about this? Everyone go grab a pen and mail a letter to the DoJ about this (err... better make that a fax... I bet they're not too keen on mail right now). Explain exactly what they're doing, and spell out why it's blatantly anticompetetive. Explain that the web is based on open standards so that any browser can be used, and that by doing this they are trying to strongarm people to use their browser only.
If the DoJ is aware of even half of what goes on, they'll be more capable of fighting a court battle.
I also use Galeon, along with Junkbuster. Bypassing MSN's silly UserAgent filter is easy with Junkbuster: simply change the user-agent directive to something that will pass their test. I tried the following string first:
user-agent (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Linux 2.4.12-ac4 SMP)but apparently they check your operating system field as well. So I switched it to this, which passes their filter and allows me to view MSN content:
user-agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows sucks more cock than Bill Gates' mom, which is why i really use Linux 2.4.12-ac3 SMP)For the Debian Linux users out there, Junkbuster is available in Woody and Sid. You can grab a slightly antiquated tarball of my Junkbuster settings from my web page (or email me for a more recent snapshot).
Odds of being killed by lightning and winning the lottery in the same day: 1 in 2^55
it's a WEBPAGE, it should work with any browser.
Free Mac Mini
The MSN sites are pretty useless anyways
This is even easier than programming the home-shopping channels out of my TV. If they don't want me to see their dreck, fine. It's not like MSN has anything that isn't available anywhere else. I'd also say that it's telling that they *lock people out* on XP day. The connection makes itself, Microsoft is shameless in their self-justification of anything they do in the pursuit of business.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Middlesex University has Netscape 4.7 installed. I was all ways suspicious of it not working on the WinNT machines but working on the Unix. Any way I hate to be a Linuk FAN(cough)atic but this just goes to show that Bill maybe the one who pushes users to free open source software. Just imagine when the kde gnome desktops are as well polished as windows with word processing packages etc. Its not going to take that long to get there, and then there will be two alternative on the market one free/cheep the other run by a man like Bill Gates. If users are slow to take up, and they usually are, then business will not be as slow off the mark. Just imagine companies paying subscription fees, if there is alternatives that are as good and free/cheep they will not pay Bill.
I opened my IE6 browser on W2k this morning, and noticed immediately that MSN was updated for XP.....
Except.... THE PAGE DOESN'T DISPLAY PROPERLY WITH IE6, fonts are overwriting each other, items are misaligned....
Woohoo! Leave it to Microsoft to break EVERYTHING....
the parent is +1 funny... right?
Obviously they're just full of it.
From their links on the bottom of the "Your browser doesn't work page...", Terms of Use doesn't function, but the advertise link, privacy, and Get Netwise links do work, despite the fact that they all are *.msn domains.
Someone should send this to the DOJ. I'm sure another blatant attempt to introduce incompatibility would peak someone's interest.
I do. Visitors should choose if they browse the site with their "incompatible" browser, not the site. If the browser really can't render the site, then, well, I guess the user goes away.
This is just very ugly move from MS(N) against it's (free software?) competitors.
I think this is Bill Gates or Microsoft saying to Mozilla (slash Open Source / or competing browsers)
"You are in check..."
Possibly followed with
"Mate in " + intMovesMSIE + "...."
Let's see how many other web (e-commerce / news) sites follow suit. I know certain developers that would love to develop with only one browser in mind. After all this might be some way for certain people developing web sites to say.. Hey if MS only develops for one browser, why can't we. I love mob theory.
Tell them that you use lynx because it's best with your text reader. If they want to exclude all the blind people from the server, then that's fine with you. Isn't it the law that companies that do government contracts have to comply with ADA rules?
Monsieur s'il vous plaît bon, refrain de parler à l'aide louée de cette façon.
J'ai payé le bon argent cet esclave, et je ne vous permettrai pas de dire de telles choses à lui.
Cependant, pour un prix modeste, je vous permettrai de le battre.
Merci de votre aide.
Works fine with Netscape Communicator 4.77. I'm using WebWasher, so the host only sees the proxy.
I don't like MSN anyway, but we can not stand for this...
Take the fight to the street.. DDOS the site. Get 30,000 of your friends and take Redmond by force.
Gates may to bribe Bush and get the Justice department off his back...
But let he rue the day he prevented the open source community from accessing MSN.......
Onminweb is a Mac OS X browser w/ a beautiful way of rendering things and dodgy (but improving) CSS support.
this is just another attempt by microsoft to create more fud.
average joe who just thought to give mozilla a try and looks at these page's is gonna think that it's bad software coz it cannot display those[msn] pages correctly.
sadly enough, I think they might even succeed.
too bad..
Look at the source of the page:
;-)
src="http://c.msn.com/c.gif?PS=10215&NA=1154&a mp;NC=10009&PI=7317&DI=340"
Oops, that's the copyright symbol
This is this first time i have heard of a site having so much business it needs to block some people view it.
Its one thing to block non-frames / non-javascript browsers , but this is just madness.
Cruise TT
I have some old hotmail accounts that I check once in a while. Since hotmail started re-directing me to msn.com whenever they could, I started adding 'msn.com' aliases for my local IP in /etc/hosts.
So instead of increasing their traffic numbers, I just get sent to my local apache server (which re-directs me to google).
No great loss.
The software giant admitted that it is watching for Opera strings--but only because it wants to encourage people to use standard-compliant browsers.
2 Things:
1) Not letting people use your site because of your browser isn't encouraging, it's forcing them.
2) Are the "extra" tags that IE only reads part of the standard html spec?
You want MSN only to work with IE, fine. Go ahead, i'm not going to argue about the right to manage your web site the way you see fit. But don't expect me or anyone else to swallow this "standard-compliant browser" bullshit.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
It's easy guys, don't buy/use anymore MS products/services. This is the only solution. Fooling their webserver by faking the identity of our browser will only increase the apparent use of IE in web statistics studies, as it was already pointed out. ONLY visit OPEN STANDARDS' friendly pages, this is a way to support the people doing the right thing.
-- Don Inodoro
This tactic is more like one kid not allowing another to come to their birthday party because the uninvited kid isn't popular enough. Really, it's quite childish behaviour
As far as I can see this is how the world works. It doesn't end after elementary school. People are bastards and they'll fuck over anyone if they think it'll make them a buck. The only way to win is to be a bigger bastard than the other guy.
Not necessary. Just change it to something other than the competition Microsoft is trying to squash at the moment. For example, the MSN site doesn't try to fast-talk people out of using their Squid proxies (that identify themselves as such).
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
in a bad economy, the thieves become more active!
What I love is how they're broadening their ability to piss people off.. good job guys!
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
I found this out a few days ago in K-Meleon when I would get 'Page not Found' errors on ESPN.com. I had the UserAgent Setting set to Mozilla 5.0, so I switched it to Internet Explorer 6 and the pages loaded perfectly. Don't know if you can switch it in Mozilla, but K-Meleon is faster and more responsive anyway so it's worth trying out.
The World is Yours.
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.
Within this is the real story...that M$ doesn't believe that these other browsers support W3C Standards. Pardon me, but isn't Opera's modus operandi that it only supports Standardized Technologies?
-dbc
I find it astonishing, how, without even wasting a thought about the ongoing trial accusing Microsoft of unfair busines practices, they go on and do just more of the same. Locking out folks from MSN (and just then when other Browsers start becoming a threat again), tieing updates of their products to Passport, banning javasupport from IE, ...
Do the judges in the USA like to be made a fool of, is it active masochism on their side, is it just that Bush has decreed that Microsoft isn't to be harmed, or just that the consequences MS could face from the law are just completely outweighed by the advantages, that they so blatantly ignore any laws that might hinder their scheming?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I just clicked on "advertise" on thier error page and it just happens to look exaclty like http://msn.com from a windoze box... I thought that it wouldn't render correctly on Mozilla??? Whatever, just another reason to avoid M$...
Curt Rebelein, Junior
"Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess"
For instance, I just went to
http://supportservices.msn.com/us/help.asp and it gives you a god-awful javascript pop-up window asking you to upgrade. If you click Cancel it shows you a page, but its not the same page that I get under IE 5.5
Just for fun, fire up the "original browser".
telnet msn.com 80
This is some sort of test page! Very funny!
The real silver bullet to good programs is caffeine; lots and lots of caffeine! *twitch, twitch*
they are not treated as individuals
under the law. They have no individual
accountability. Therefore--morals/ethics
don't apply.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Netscape 4.72 frequently goes into an infinite
loop on NT 4 and the only way to fix it is to kill
the process.
Well I tried Opera for linux and failed, netscape 4.6 and failed , mozilla failed, but If you really need to use www.msn.com , try with the cache at google.comm sn.com/+msn&hl=en
:), its just the damn first page
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:K9NbKBrvrg4:
The sub sections inside www.msn.com work perfectly under mozilla
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
Is it too late to add a clause in the Anti-Terrorist Bill for justice against Corporate Assholes?
Not having MS office on linux hasn't really bothere.
Having hardly any commercial games on linux hasn't really bothered me either.
No IE, didn't phase me.
Now they have gone too far.
Looks like I'll be picking up WinXP tonight, as life w/o msn.com isn't a life worth living.
Great idea, guys.
Direct from the opera.comwebsite:
XHTML 1.0
extensible HyperText Markup Language, XHTML 1.0, claims to be the bridge between
the old Internet, based on HTML, and the new one, which will be based
on XML, as detailed by the W3C's XHTML 1.0 specification's working group.
Opera 5.0 has full support of XHTML 1.0, for your viewing pleasure!
Attention: Web Browser Upgrade Required to View MSN.com
Attention: Web Browser Upgrade Required to View MSN.com
If you are seeing this page, we have detected that the browser that
you are using will not render MSN.com correctly. Additionally, you'll
see the most advanced functionality of MSN.com only with the latest
version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or MSN Explorer. If you wish to
visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below.
* Internet Explorer for Windows
* Internet Explorer for Macintosh
* MSN Explorer for Windows
_2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of
Use Advertise TRUSTe Approved Privacy Statement GetNetWise
Cruise TT
Look, my point is the internet is a shared resource, just like a road. Linux and Windows are different, but not so different that I can't see "Windows formatted" pages at all. Pages that segregate based on User Agent strings only hurt themselves. Last time I checked a hit on a website is a hit no matter if you use a Macintosh or you channel the internet using black candles and a dead goats head. (RFC 666)
Some updated news articles claim that the reason is that the browsers that don't support XHTML are being blocked. So, I ran over to the W3C site and (1) confirmed their browser, Amaya, is compliant and (2) downloaded and tested msn.com.
I got the same error page as mozilla. Amazing how Amaya is labeled by W3C as XHTML 1.0 compliant but MS doesn't think it is. I thought W3C determined what the XHTML standard was. Perhaps the W3C should check with MS to see how they are non-compliant in their support of the standard.
Quando este flooder do crap parecer ter escrito um programa rather interessante, não é muito original entre flooders do crap. Um pode ter o mesmo efeito copí uma história da notícia e afixando isso.
Quem sabe que evil lurks nos corações dos homens? Snuggles que o urso amaciando da tela conhece.
Porque é que meu fígado está unido a meu braço pelo velcro?
Chops de carne de porco para a venda! Barato!
I tried iCab on the Mac and was given the finger. Changing to a user string of "Mozilla/4.76 (Macintosh; I; PPC)" allowed me to access the site (with nice, broken XHTML).
Changing the user agent string back after loading the home page www.msn.com allowed me to get to all of the links I clicked on.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I have a solution. Don't go to MSN anymore. I'd rather not give them the ad revenue anyway.
Carpe Deez
I'm forced to use Windows 98 on the laptop provided to me by my employer. This morning I got a pop-up window from the "Windows Critical Update Notifier" telling me there was a critical update for win98. Clicking on update now took me to a web page that advertised Windows XP for 30 seconds before taking me to the windows 98 update page to downlaod the 480K update. I'd bet my linux box that there was no update and it was yet another advertising ploy by Micro$oft to advertise their new product. I also noticed that after the update when I open Windows Media Player it goes to the XP advertisment page now before redirecting me the WMP site. Perhaps this is the 480K "critical update" I downloaded.
Hey, find a way to display M$ sites with Mozilla all you like, what I really want is a way to tell the useragent to "piss off, I'll use whatever software I please".
It shouldn't take more than a couple minutes to add a line to my index.php telling IE users that "in order to get the most complete viewing experience on my site, it is recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of Mozilla and/or Opera" and give them download links.
Of course, I'll also let them into my site, while MS wouldn't perform the same courtesy for me...
I'm on OS X and Omniweb 4.0.5 works fine, even without identifying itself as a different browser. However, "Fizzilla" (Mozilla) definitely doesn't work...
Netscape 4.72 frequently goes into an infinite
loop on NT 4 and the only way to fix it is to kill
the process.
In the zdnet article, a representative from Microsoft states that all msn.com pages are W3C compliant.
A quick check with the w3c validator proves they lie.
In case you use the *official* Netscape 6.1 release (don't know about 6.0 or 6.01). It is just lame that Mozilla is blocked and Netscape 6.1 is allowed just fine...
Actually, this is the same behaviour they had in their beta page (http://beta.msn.com, nothing to see there now).
Marcelo Vanzin
If you are seeing this page, we have detected that the browser that you are using will not render MSN.com correctly. Additionally, you'll see the most advanced functionality of MSN.com only with the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or MSN Explorer. If you wish to visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below.
- Internet Explorer for Windows
- Internet Explorer for Macintosh
- MSN Explorer for Windows
©2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.Terms of UseAdvertiseTRUSTe Approved Privacy StatementGetNetWise------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
I hope they dont take away espn.com from me. :(
Can you see Iron City here?
I verified this with Netscape 4.07: "If you wish to visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below." There's no access to MSN.
... W3C standard,' said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. 'For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the standards.' ... 'We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards.'"
"'All of our development work for the new MSN.com is
Suggest? Only Microsoft could say, "We're not going to let you use our Web site unless you use our software (or pretend to)," and call it a suggestion!
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
So are you saying that I should block all IE users just cause I make sure that Mozilla works on my sites (because I happen to be the 2% minority)???
That is just plain stupid! MSN is a major site they should have developers that are smart enough to develop a site that can be viewed in ALL major browers. I make sure that all of my sites can be viewed w/IE, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and Konqueror. Why? Cause that is what my user base uses and it's not that hard.
Curt Rebelein, Junior
"Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess"
isn't it depressing how just a few years ago it was microsoft that had to massage their user agent string to look like netscape?
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use. The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones."
- Tim Berners-Lee
Information Management: A Proposal CERN 1989
But masters, remember that I am an ass: though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
Create a file called 'msn_cmd' and put the following in it:
# Command logfile created by Lynx 2.8.4rel.1 (17 Jul 2001)
key q
key y
Next create a file called 'fuck_msn' and put the following in it:
lynx -cmd_script=./msn_cmd -accept_all_cookies -useragent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Linux; Heh, IE6.0 runs on Linux!)" www.msn.com
Put the 'fuck_msn' file in a cron job and go to town!
----------
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
MSN.com is about useless. There's always CNN.com, which I doubt will shut out non-M$ OSes.
However, there is the question of windowsupdate.microsoft.com, which I would imagine actually gets higher traffic due to the frequency of updates sent to such a huge client-base. When SP2 came out for Win2k I used Konqueror to access the site; downloaded the patch to my (rather large) Windows-Patches share on my Samba server so I could update the one machine, and distribute via CD to my less DSL-equipped friends.
It appears the windowsupdate.microsoft.com site no longer allows non-M$ browsers to access the site. Konqueror throws sporadic "Cannot connect to site" errors, consumes massive CPU (23.00+), Mozilla just stares at you blankly, telling you page is done (page source shows the upgrade recommendation), and NS 4.7x tells you to go get a M$ OS and browser. This bodes pretty poorly for those shops who have more than 1 server, but less than 5 (probably ~50%, or so of M$'s small business market), if current security and bug updates can't be retrieved once by a machine that isn't capable of processing it directly and must save the patch to a local/LAN filesystem.
I cannot help but wonder how effective throwing barriers in front of your customers in every possible direction will be at instilling their loyalty in the long run. Hopefully, their customers are getting a little smarter and a lot pissed!
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
They're treated as individuals in certain cases
for convenience, nothing more. Unlike a person,
they do not suffer coercion when messed with.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Good god, I can't access the MSN website with Opera!
Oh wait, who cares?
Seriously...
I am BelDion's
You would think that M$ would have a bit more knowledge about the people they are trying to block. If you use Windows, chances are you will be running IE or NS, and you wouldn't see the message. But the people that they are trying to get to "upgrade" have more knowledge than that... hence the user-agent string. Do they seriously think it'll force the target people to upgrade, or just provide another easily cleared hurdle?
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Try this out...
n .c om/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.ms
Who knows how to send MSN a bug report?
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing
standard, indeed
there's more than one way to do me.
I used proxomitron to set my user-agent to some nonsense (it was "!b" without the quotes) and went to msn.com and got the standard "upgrade to IE" message. Then I went to msn.com.br and got this message:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch: '[string: ""]'
/include/browser.asp, line 45
I figured I'd be able to find out a bit about their filter (written in vbscript) by altering the input a bit. So then I changed my user agent to "!b(msie)" and got
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch: '[string: "e"]'
/include/browser.asp, line 45
My hypothesis was that it looked at something right before the ")". So then I tried "!b(msie;msie;windows)" and got
Nota ao usuário
Infelizmente seu navegador não é compatível com essa versão, portanto não será possível visualizar todo o conteúdo que disponibilizamos especialmente para você. Para ver corretamente o novo portal MSN, baixe agora a versão mais recente do Internet Explorer ou o novo MSN Explorer. É grátis!
Se você acha que recebeu essa mensagem por engano, por favor confirme que seu navegador possui capacidade de visualização instalada. (No Internet Explorer, acesso pelo menu Visualizar | Opções).
© 2000 Microsoft Corporation. Todos os direitos reservados. Termos de Uso.
which looks like it says something about having to download IE and that it's free. So I changed back to !b and then to !b(msie) and kept getting that final message. Looks like they must have changed the script or something. Just as it was getting good.
Any thoughts?
Buy Hex-Rated Stuff, fight the DMCA!
Hmm, so why does it work for Netscape 6, but not for Mozilla, since Netscape 6 is built on Mozilla? Doesn't make sense to me...
I noticed that the new version of MSN is running under Microsoft's .Net platform (via .aspx extensions in the links and forms with runat="server" from the source). I wonder if they are trying to prove that .net is ready for prime time?
Microsoft has been trying to blur the line between client and server code to make web programming easier (i.e. more like Visual Basic). Perhaps a lot of the functionality contained with in their new Web Form technology, uses I.E. only functionality. If so MSN could be first of many I.E. only web sites.
I think everyone should apply the microsoft free friday apache mod. If they are going to use their market share to destroy the competition, I think we should use the strong apache market share to fight back. After all last i checked apache was the number 1 web server.
2 23 0&mode=nested
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/02/114
Pseudocode is code to demonstrate a concept, not designed to be run. Like certain M$ software.
Not saying that they should flat-out ban other browsers, but working as a web developer, I've had some dreams that roughly approximate that. An increasingly tiny minority of the world uses anything other than IE and, no offense but NS and Opera don't exactly render pages like they should.
Netscape 6.X: why do you insist on reading cascading stylesheets case-sensitively when the spec speficially says you shouldn't? Wonderful.
That said, yes. It is harsh. They should let anyone in that wants to come in, but if it's a matter of being slammed by e-mails screaming for them to make every page render perfectly in a browser that maybe 0.5% of their readership uses, well... what do you want?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
MS is sounding very hypocritical. They claim that they are doing this to prevent "non-compliant" browsers from rendering the page incorrectly - browsers that do not support the XHTML standard, but then let in Netscape 4.7 and above?
The last time I used NN 4.7 it didn't render anything correctly, much less being XHTML compliant!
If they allow NN 6.0, then they should allow Mozilla 0.9.4 and above as well.
Very hypocritical.
--RedZone
I just tested www.msn.com with mozilla 0.95 build 2001101201 and got the "Ha ha ha, we are Microsoft and you are hosed!" response. Warm Fuzzies for Bill...
Not only does OmniWeb work on MSN, it looks better than with IE. i wonder how Microsquish is able to get away with this in the "normal user" mindset. Do they just go out and get IE and give up? This is getting really sad. It is preference discrimination at its fullest. Maybe there will be a civil rights march on washington (the state) to change this horrible form of hate. ;)
Let's boycott msn.com!
--Chris
Now, when I use my hotmail account, when I log out, instead of redirecting me to a stupid page full of crap that takes forever to load, I get taken to a plain white page that loads in an instant and I can move on with my life. Very much more user friendly than the old system. Thank you, Microsoft.
Corporations are fictional individuals, creations of the state but with as many rights as one wishes to go to court and prove they have.
In a sane world, lying to people about your competitors' products over the internet would be called "wire fraud" and be prosecuted.
The reason I ask is that their reason for blocking access is because that it clearly says that the site won't work unless you're using the LATEST version of Internet Explorer. If this is true, then they should ALSO be blocking IE 4.x
In a feat of luck, hotmail seems to have been spared this fate.
yeah sure, but try loggin in with NS 6.1, you'll get the message. However I caould read hotmail fine with NS 6.1
The reason this matters is fairly scary. Windows XP does a half way decent job of helping you do things on it through "services"... For instance it will let you upload images from a digital camera to the web.. (guess which web page... yeah msn.com). If you need to get drivers off line you can do that to.. (guess which web page... yeah msn.com)... It has pushed all sorts of things through MSN and if you want to use Windows, you'll have to use MSN, which means... da da da.. you'll have to use the latest version of IE...
Anyone that is PRO-MS (I am neutral, well WAS) about the fact that the DOJ should investigate on smaller crooks or computer stores that do things way worse than microsoft (saying you have to change your hard drive because it had a virus, and selling back your hardrive to a new system, to name one example), well here's the quote that totally disgust me and gives credibility to the anti-MS-buisness practices crowd:
"Microsoft is seeing (that) it is an Opera browser and shutting it out," said Tetzchner, whose team was testing the problem Thursday. "If you change the Opera string by one letter, it is letting us in."
I am a bit worried if that is true, even if it's patched because people yelled, just the fact that they've TRIED this worries me a lot.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
..I'd suggest AOL at this point block access to all their controlled content (including web AIM interface that a lot of people i know use) as well as things like cnn to all older than current ms browsers and suggest an upgrade to netscape.
from the front page of kernel.org
Due to U.S. Exports Regulations, all cryptographic software on this site is subject to the following legal notice:
This site includes publicly available encryption source code which, together with object code resulting from the compiling of publicly available source code, may be exported from the United States under License Exception "TSU" pursuant to 15 C.F.R. Section 740.13(e).
Kerneli.org was no longer needed because the usgov finally loosened up crypto export restrictions. Do a little research before you post your paranoid rantings
0 1 - just my two bits
Who the hell cares about MSN so much that they change their user agent string just to get in ?
I wouldn't visit microsoft pages for money.
well, this actually isn't all that surprising to me. for anyone who's used MSN Explorer they are definitely trying to turn it into an AOL like experience. they will probably move forward and start doing all sorts of activeX trickery in the near future.
they are turning back the clock to the days before the popularity of the Web where you had proprietary servers and propriatery clients. it's worked for AOL, after all. and it's the smart thing to do. they want to better control their users, give them more specific functionality, etc. etc.
and it's not exactly like we're missing out... MSN has, does, and always will suck anyway.
what would be scary is if they started to branch out outside of MSN. do they have the balls to make MSDN accessible via IE only? microsoft.com? MSNBC?
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
So indeed, it's not rendering the page correctly which is exactly why Microsoft is blocking those browsers. It's about time more sites started doing this instead
No, it's about time they spend more time on content rathera than presentation. Jesus christ, the web is about information, not presentation... ask any web designer, HTML is not designed to render visual information exactly. If exact freaking visual presentation ("you can't view our page if its even a pixel off!") why are they using the web as a medium anyway? They should be using PDF or Quark or dead-tree mailings or something. Now who's too stupid or too stubborn to use the best tool for the job?
Anyway, wow would you like it if television stations only let you use televisions from a certain manufacturer? I mean, shit, I'm sure the director of Friends wants you to watch the show in color on a nice 57" screen... but it still works on a 7" black-and-white TV.
"Too bad you've got a Sony TV... ABC's broadcasts only work on Mitsubishi TV's... too bad you're too stupid or stubborn to buy one"
"Sorry, Fords only work with Exxon gas now... are you too stupid or stubborn to drive to an Exxon?"
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Who goes to the msn website anyway?
Okay, we know that MSN is excluding certain (often standards-compliant) browsers, ostensibly in the name of standards compliance, while allowing other browsers that are clearly not standards compliant, but have little market share. There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Microsoft is being malicious and deliberately undermining competing browsers. The second is that the Microsoft programmers are too dumb to know the difference between "exclude all but..." and "include all but...".
These explanations are not contradictory. The odd MSN.com behavior may be an example of malicious anticompetitive behavior, very badly implemented.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
New MSN messenger 4.5 ( My girlfriend needs it ) download now!
So i think let's do that for her, ERROR... Only available for WINXP. So we are starting to see a pattern here. New releases of their stupid appz will not be available for other platforms then XP.
These MF's lost me forever, and i'm starting work on my Linux/GNU business plan tomorrow. So i can expect to be rolling out fat 19" Linux servers within 6 months.
Maybe the trolls should take a few days off and crapflood msn?
I went over to validator.w3.org and keyed in msn.com's URL.
Not surprised that there are errors in their source code. For being a comapny that's done all this for standards purposes:
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard" Bob Visse - MSN Marketing weasel.
Surprised by MS? Nope. Expected that their reasons are Bogus? Yep.
Blah.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
I just created this file while my browser was running, shut down Mozilla and tried to restart it. It complained (and bombed out) the first time, and then restarted fine (and has been running well since). You can verify the UserAgent String you are using by looking at the "Help/About" window (the string appears below the build number). Using this string also has another advantage. Up until now I've been running Mozilla on Win2K (requirement for work), now I can proudly proclaim that I'm running it on Linux (which I would rather be).
:)
Nice!
Oh... and does anyone else find it Ironic that the theme of WindowsXP, displayed in a big GIF on the MSN homepage is... "YES YOU CAN!"
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Do they somehow 'owe' you access to their site? No. They don't.
Just like you, they can make a site that does *whatever they want* with the information supplied.
It's stupid, yes; this is like when they made Windows not work on DRDOS on purpose... they just detected whether or not it was msdos, and then refused to run. IT wasn't based on any real technical reasons.
Tried it with Solaris under Netscape 4.77 and the same rev under Linux (Mandrake 8). No prob.
Definitely not lynx happy though.
You know the one saying you can't install windows on a non microsoft version of DOS - History repeats itself :-)
It seems that everyone and their cat is trying to connect to MSN with various browsers. This would probably mean that MSN gets more hits than usual, and can become the most popular site. I do not know of any web traffic services, but it would be very interesting to see how slashdot crowd (people that rarely visit MSN) boosted MSN traffic.
Karma: Dude, where is my Karma???
As much as I hate to say it, it is their website, and if they don't want me to read it, fine, I will go somewhere else. This may be flamebait, but if I don't like what a company wants me to do for their services, I don't use them. The only way to talk to a corporation is through your wallet and your choices about their products.
Sure, they are claiming "technical" problems that are not true, but I know how my designer friends feel when they get that call from the guy who can't view the page because he is on NCSA Mosaic. You can't please everyone.
Pbur
The argument I see on the news stories is that Microsoft is whacking Opera and Mozilla because they don't fully support the W3C standards. AMAYA is available at www.w3.org and is the W3's benchmark standards compliant browser. It doesn't work either...
That Microsoft lies probably surprises no one. However, judging from these compliance tables, they are lying in a fairly major way:
Unix/Linux Chart
Windows Chart
Macintosh Chart
If they are letting Netscape 4.7 in, the Opera browser and Mozilla are more standards compatible and should have no problems at all!
My God! It's full of Voids!
I know alot of people are pointing out easy changes to get around this.
I never worried about that when I read this article.
It's that you even have to get around it. Absoutely ridiculous. They will never force everyone to switch over to IE, but they will get a whole bunch. I can't believe you have to put extra work to even look at their site.
I move we petition for disallowing use of IE on Slashdot.
Won't Microsoft be crying when Slashdot allows only VMS Lynx and HP/UX Mosaic?
Blocking out people based on their browser simply lowers you to Microsoft's level. Rather, we should frame the discussion in terms of invitation vs. exclusion(or, if you want to be more hyperbolic, freedom vs. tyranny).
Much better would be to check the browser, and if it's IE, put up additional information on the page that says something like the following [which has been written in haste; someone can undoubtedly word it better].
===
This site is Open For Business! Some companies have started an unfortunate trend of locking you out of their website if you don't use their products. (Link to cnet.com or Yahoo! article.) We don't do that. We're Open for business. This website has been written using the latest standards. It looks the best when you use a standards-compliant browser like [insert favorite browser name here], but it is viewable with _any_ browser. We appreciate everyone who comes to our site. We don't believe in locking people out. Our doors are Open for business.
===
MSN.com renders *perfectly* with my Mozilla nightly build. I changed the reported user agent as per an above post, and got to see everything on msn.com in all its glory.
Mozilla is far more compatible with all versions of IE than Netscape 4 ever was, and is indeed at least as W3C standards compliant as any version of Internet Explorer. Mozilla is the best tool for the job.
It's just that it happens to compete with the Microsoft hegemony, so I and other Mozilla users can go eat bark.
Microsoft's arrogance never ceases to astonish.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
It can be accessed with mozilla by editing prefs.js and adding Netscape6 to the useragent. E.g., user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010628 Netscape6/6.1");
I saw this a few days ago with Hotmail. Hotmail bounces you to msn after you sign out. If you think about it, Hotmail and all their Javascript should be more sensitive to browser technology. But Hotmail is still cool.
If you are enlightened enough to be running a non-Microsoft browser, what possible value do you expect to get from www.msn.com anyway? There are plenty of other sites where you can get your news without having to wade knee-deep in shit through XP advertisements.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can see the message popping up already...
"Error"
"Your trying to access a site served by an incompatible webserver. Please urge the administrator of the site to upgrade to IIS or you wil NOT be able to view this website."
That's not crap! That's the CARAMILK SECRET!!!
Adolph Hitler
Alive and well in Florida
Strange. Despite all the warnings this renders fine. :-)
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.
See for yourself.
Slashdot would never block IE, though, unless they were suddenly interested in losing about 80% of their visitors.
the OffByOne browser... (which is a cool little browser...)
I submit to you Galeon needs better documentation. I've been using it exclusively for three months now, and I've had no idea there existed a tool called gconftool (I suppose I should have paid attention during make install :). Any links?
Anyways, it rocks - tabs, xml myportal page, etc. You can't beat it. For all the KDE folk, Konqueror is nice too, I just like this better.
Thanks or coming out Slashdot. MS has been blocking non ms browsers from their sites for months. I can remember almost 6 months ago going to one of microsofts developer pages regarding javascript, I had to have a login, so I entered all my user info, press submit, boomb, they say, exit opera and use IE. end of story.
lets get a little more relevant and timeley news here boys.
Chris Lee
lee@mediawaveonline.com
I have been a long time (signed up for it about a week after it opened) hotmail user so i cant change that easily now. And I hated it that after every time i signed out it would send me to that crap and heavy MSN.com page. Now I can avoid it cleanly. For all those people trying to get around the restriction, in the name of everything holy, WHY?
FarHat
At the intersection of computation and biology.
The only folks who ever visit MSN are the ones who never changed their IE default homepage.
If you are using Mozilla, why would you ever need to look at MSN?
A choice of masters is not freedom
I just "patched" opera so that the word "opera" in the user agent string is "opero" works great. Search using any hex editor for the string MSIE (it is unicode, so the hex is 4D00 5300 4900 4500). Just following that is a line that has Opera in it. Change the 'a' to an 'o' and viola! Fixed. I did this with opera 5.12
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
Well, it's certainly NOT W3C XHTML
Tried putting www.msn.com through the W3.ORG validator:
Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.
Sorry, this document does not validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict.
Try it yourself! http://validator.w3.org
Well I tried with Konqueror, it loaded the front page without even changing Browser identification... If it booted me off other pages, I could always make Konq pretend to be IE and browse the pages anyway... Maybe it *specifically* blocks Mozilla/Netscape?
msn is a free service provided by microsoft?! If you want to see MSN that bad, just use windows and ie...as far as advertisers go, if microsoft thought that it was going to impact their number of hits by any significant percentage, they wouldn't have done this. People have to realize that we live in something called a FREE society, where you have the CHOICE whether or not to go to a site, just as microsoft has the CHOICE to give their FREE service away as they see fit.
I certainly don't. Today was the first time I've ever accessed the site. Nothing to attract me back, too.
Ah, to finally escape the MS monopoly and still have an immensely usable computer system for multimedia and productivity apps with mainstream support.
I fully expected the U.S. government to back down and let Microsoft go free. And what has Microsoft learned from all of this? Nothing. Why? Because they're "untouchable".
Burn in hell, Microsoft....
And I mean that as a former customer, not a Linux zealot.
You can modify the way IE represents its UA. I was poking around in the registry a few weeks ago. You can edit just about anything. My titlebar now reads 'MSN Blocks Mozilla, Other Browsers - Wherever you go, there you are - Buckaroo Banzi' - no mention of Internet Exploiter at all. I can't remember the exact key you have to modify, but I think it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Curre ntVersion/Internet Explorer or something.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
I'm going to get flamed for this...
As terrible as it is that Microsoft is prohibiting other web browsers from accessing MSN, it's not as if Microsoft has a monopoly on news and content on the web (at least not yet). As a company, they can decide how they want their content rendered and if IE (no matter how self-serving it is) is the only browser that does the job perfectly, then so be it.
I develop web applications and there are times when a client asks for something that simply isn't feasible (or perhaps possible) in Netscape 4.x, so we inform the client of that and, effectively, prohibit them from using Netscape 4.x to access the application. I don't see much of a difference here.
Now I would see a major difference if there weren't news and content alternatives (and plenty of them) to MSN. Heck, IMO they could limit access to only IP addresses that are on the MSN network. Didn't Prodigy do that?
Yeah, it's self-serving and perhaps borderline unethical. But it's not illegal (yet) and if they want to make a sight that uses IE features they can't guarantee are supported in other browers, that's their call.
My sigs always suck.
Opera 5.12 reporting as MSIE or Mozilla 5 gets blocked on my Win2K box.
Netscape 4.77 and IE5.50 both get passed through but there's a lot of content on the MSN page that looks... uncompliant.
-philmills
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, will be quoted out of context on
Clearly you need to be reporting either (A) a Microsoft browser, or (B) any browser on an unsupported (but recognised!) platform.
So if Microsoft can't identify your platform, it won't let you in. If it can identify your platform as Linux, it lets you in.
Since I don't use Flash, Java, Javascript, or cookies, and I lie about both my user agent and referer, I'm pretty used to lots of badly broken pages. Frequently I can get past the front door by looking tat the page source, but in general I don't bother with web pages that require such nonsense.
Those ppl would be pretty pissed off if in the next apache release it would block requests for IE/AOL/[Insert other browser restricted to only mac os and windoze].
They just don't relize how pissed off their users would be if we ever stuped down to M$FT's level of ignorance.
lol, that's the funniest thing I've seen all day.
What about BeOS users?????
www.beos.com
I've been thinking about this for a while, and prompted by this scenario, I've come to the conclusion that protocols that let client-identifying strings go through is just asking for discrimination and phony statistics.
Many protocols use client identifers, such as HTTP, SSH, and OpenPGP. However, I'm not seeing any true purpose for having these identifiers stuck into the messages used in these protocols. Perhaps at one time they were used so that workarounds for buggy clients could be made, but the problem there is with the buggy client. Nowdays, however, checking client identifiers, be it via user-agent or Javascript tests, it is used to discriminate against certain clients.
Futhermore, many clients probably lie about what what they are, in order to get a server to listen to them. This is sad, because it creates false statistics about what the client percentage breakdown really is. In addition to this problem, the statistics themselves create a snowballing effect, suggesting to server-admins to only 'support' certain clients, and suggesting to end-users that 'everyone' is using a certain client and they should too.
Just as justice is supposed to be blind, I feel the same should be said about servers; they should have no knowledge of what client it is that is accessing them.
As more and more services become network-enabled, we should be wary of any protocol that implements a client-identifier. Or else we will see more of the same discrimination.
We're sorry, but you must drive a Ford in order to access this road. If you drive a Chevrolet or Mazda, your tires have been slashed. Have a nice day.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
If this was actually an issue of making sure the browser conformed with the W3C standards, one would think that Amaya, the web browser produced by the W3C, might at least be allowed in. Amaya 5.1, which is the most recent version (or at least the most recent version in the FreeBSD ports tree), is not allowed in either. Am I to believe that MSIE is more W3C-compliant than the browser made by the W3C? All of you people who are actually going to the effort of changing your browser return strings (I am not, I don't really care) should click on the banner ads, search the advertiser's website for a contact email address, and inform the advertiser of MSN's actions. That is what will get this changed quickly.
Best Slashdot comment ever
I think most people are tired of supporting multiple browsers. Either we need ONE browser installed everywhere or several browsers that all work identically (the latter which is highly unlikely).
When will this madness end?
Forgot to add - you are hex editting opera.exe. Worked for me, no guarantees on the legality, functionality or any other ality there is.
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
- This proves MS is evil
- Maybe it's an honest mistake
- If you don't like MS don't use their stuff
- MS is being unfairly criticised again
It's quite amazing that so far there are no posts I can see falling into category number 4 on this story. What happened to all the MS apologists? No astroturfers? Nobody rising to their defense on this? No undercover MS agents or employees have an opinion on this? Very interesting......Well if you go to carpoint.msn.com you can get in if you set opera to identify as MSIE 5! Then you can set opera to identify as Opera and keep going, though you can not get to the main MSN page. But you can use car point!
What exactly is your point? You can cahnge the useragent to anything you want, even MSIE. The problem if we all do this the web masters thinks that the world is almost 100% MSIE and they have even less incentive to comply with standards.
Help fight continental drift.
... that you can open the "advertisement" site! so obviously MSN is NOT interestet in customers if they you e.g. Mozilla, but in people willing to put their AD on MSN's page... yeah, perhaps Is should do the same thing with my Homepage... Perhaps like this: "You are welcome to my Site, if you are willing to send me some cheques..." I think someone at MSN didn't understand the meaning of a Website... or do they consult their Webmasters from the XXX-industry??? :-)
Tend to post comments only when drunk
... I would have NEVER EVER known about it.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Were these pages run by Netscape, Inc?
Yesterday's item about tiny apps was checked out. One of the items downloaded and tested is the OffByOne web browser which I am useing to post this comment. I just checked and www.nsn.com web site just refused to display for me. It just pointed to various download options of IE? If I can't use the web browserof MY choice I won't be going to your site.
zenray
I can get to msn.com using Netscape 6.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
how long before someone sets up a proxy server that just munges the user agent string?
At MSN.CA I can't get to MyMSN (my profile) unless I use Netscape 6.1. When I attempt to do so with IE 6.0 nothing happens. That's almost the opposite of what this article suggests, not to mention pretty funny.
They should block mozilla because you had trouble using Mozilla?
Apparently you dont use Windows then. I've had many more problems with Windows than I've had with Mozilla.
Wow. I'm just shocked you actually said that.
It kinda makes me sick to my stomach.
Here are just a few recent ones from Microsoft: (from the article)
. Two... and Great Plains . Three... also lean heavily on MSN features. Besides launching MSN as the default home page, Internet Explorer 6 replaces the more typical "page not found" with an MSN search page.. Four... .
Through Windows XP, MSN is emerging as a major end point for delivering those services. The majority of Microsoft's most popular products link to MSN.
Office XP, for example, features a pull-down, get-more-info menu feature called Smart Tags that connects to MSN. One... Microsoft had planned to include Smart Tags in Internet Explorer 6 but pulled the feature. Financial programs Money
Windows XP is chock full of MSN hooks. The Internet search feature from the Start Menu uses MSN.. Five... Windows Media Player drives traffic to MSN. Six... , as does the Passport authentication feature found in Windows Messenger. The Photo & Camera Wizard, where people can order online prints from digital images, also directs traffic to MSN. Seven...
Seven, that's right, seven examples of leveraging their existing monopoly (the OS, which is XP) to create further monopolies (MSN.)
If MSN was just another news and entertainment website I wouldn't be saying this, but as we've learned recently: through passport MSN will soon be a center for software applications delivered over the internet. This is a new market and will probably be a very profitable one. If Microsoft can create a monopoly (or near monopoly) on such a market, they will be in the same position with Passport as they are with their OS. This will not be good for internet consumers.
~ now you know
So maybe they should take it offline to ensure compatability...
w .msn.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doc type=Inline
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fww
Just put the following line in "user.js" in your Mozilla profile folder:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011011 Netscape6/6.5");
Lets you view www.msn.com just fine while still leting them know that you use Mozilla.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
It looks all messed up, images are layered on top of each other the wrong way. I bet it looks better in mozilla :)
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I have a proxy that makes ALL of my browsers look like Konqueror. Including IE. And MSN doesn't like that, either.
http://diddl.firehead.org/.z/ie5-proxy-fun.png
They have a feedback page, why don't we all just drop them a friendly note?
http://www.msn.com/feedback.ashx
Yep, those sneaky bastards.
Of course, I'm also using the Proxomitron as a html proxy, but I think you get the point.
-J
I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners. - Berke Breathed
So is it actually standard? According to http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .msn.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29 &doctype=Inline, nope: there are 4 errors. Unsurprisingly, the page it is validating is, of course, not the actual MSN home page. Evidentally, the W3C doesn't understand the latest W3C standards. Now, admittedly, I'm not sure anyone actually understands the most recent XHTML spec, but it's a bit unkind of MSN to say so.
I figufe it should have the options:
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
This seems all like a big ploy for little ol' M$ to "convince" people to use their operating system and/or not use the tools on the operating system you want in the way that you want. I haven't heard of any cases where WINE has been used to run IE. Think about it. This method makes it difficult for anyone lazy or uneducated enough to break through their censoring scheme. You have to know that you can change what your browser says it is, how to change it and go about changing it. M$ is essentially saying "I censor you because you use my competitors software".
Consider:
Europe hasn't closed the books on any legal actions against Microsoft.
Microsoft has chosen to *specifically*block*Opera,*by*name* out of their web sites.
Opera is developed in Europe. (AFAIK)
This action would have looked a *whole* lot better had they specifically enabled XHTML-compatible browsers, and redirected you to a page with a list. Also on that page should have been a contact point to get your browser included on the list, *at no charge*.
I thought Mozilla was supposed to be The Most Standards-Compliant Browser out there, clearly better than Netscape 4.5x or 4.7x. Yet I've heard reports of NS 4.7x getting in and Mozilla not.
This stinks. I wonder how many people MS will fool. It really doesn't matter much to me, since I have the MS ClassB network firewalled off in order to prevent 'phoning home' when booted to Windows.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If you change your useragent string to mimic IE, you increase the apparent market share of IE. This will encourage developers and businesses to target IE and further marginalize browsers based on open standards.
;)
So if you must visit MSN (and I can't imagine why that would be), obfuscate your UA slightly. Of course, they might start checking for this... and by continuing to visit MSN, you are voting in favor of more dirty tricks.
Do any browsers have a per-site UserAgent setting? I bet Konqueror will be the first! Followed by mozilla, but mozilla won't have an interface for it for a year or so
... that "you are blocked" page is the most standards compliant HTML I've ever seen on msn.com :P
Part of .NET is the Passport functionality
Passport allows a single login (Held by MS, how nice of them) to access the multitude of services that they and their partners (eBay is one I think, Amazon may be another) use to keep track of you. All tied by MSN.
If MSN is only available to IE users, then you have to use IE to get the full functionality from these large sites.
IE is only available for Windows and Mac. So that means Microsoft can effectively dictate which OS you can use, or can not use.
Does this piss anyone else off?
Since you guys liked my airport search solution. I worked for some time as an embedded browser developer. Microsoft's filtering of other browsers really irritated me, because it makes the concept of an embedded browser near unworkable and I was making trying to make a living off of embedded browsers.
So everytime I ran across such a web site I would send a letter to the web site adminstrator describing how locking customers out was bad for business. I would also describe how writing Javascript that had to test for the browser was a bad idea as well, because everytime a new browser would come along, the web page would have to be rewritten again. I included a list of all known browsers. Also a description of how using Microsoft products and methods insured incompatibily, and could they please use standards and not cater to giving in to Bill Gate's Monopoly.
Then I would also call up the company in question and try to get through to the marketing department and tell them the same diatribe. I would settle for the complaints department. Sometimes I would get my wife to send an email as well complaining.
I actually made progress in my compaign. I got two websites to switch (out of about twenty I've done this to). One of the one's that switched was a bank.
Now what would happen if everyone who got burned by this wrote in and complained in a similar manner. Enough irritate potential customers and you'd be surprised what changes will happen. Just one irritated customer was enough for 10% of the companies I encoutered to change.
Be vocal and express your displeasure to the company responsible for the website.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but does modifying your User-Agent string in your browser constitute "circumventing an access method" (a familiar phrase from the DMCA)?
Something to think about...
Maybe the solution is to exclude access for MS Explorer and AOL clients from the rest of the web....
prefs.js gets rewritten whenever you change a preference, and the useragent hack'll get lost.
user.js is where you put manual changes.
...support.microsoft.com has the same problem (which really pisses me off, since you have to use this site about once every hour if you have to support your windows clients ;( )
Time to add "Browser preference" to XV amendment.
badness 10000
...oh wait, sorry, It's just that the new MSN site looks like complete CRAP (just like the changes to hotmail a month or two ago) I guess I should get used to an OS that looks like it was designed for 2 year olds.
It's a microsoft site and you want to use a non-Microsoft product to view the site?
How dare you!
But then why should it be different. They want to be the end-all, be-all, company of the world. I mean why would a company that is "NOT" a monopoly allow visitors to deprive themselves of the full experiance of visiting their site just because they use a "second rate" browser.
I even found that some areas of the site don't work on a Mac. (script errors)
The simple reason is because they are a monopoly.
They won't rest until the only software you use is theirs.
And every roadblock that they can put in your way will only strenghten that fact.
My guess is that if they could they would have one of their guys run for President.
One Country, of MicroSoft, by MicroSoft, and for MicroSoft.
I'm still surprised that Windows XP wasn't called Windows Dominator.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd say let 'em win this one. If they don't want me to see their content, that is their right. After all, a quick look at the main page shows that all they can do for me is ask for my money. Buy Windows XP! Buy Air Tickets! Buy books! Buy music!
...
On the other hand
My Netscape 4.7 for Linux works fine.
OmniWeb 4.0.5 for MacOS X works fine
And (of course) IE 5 for MacOS X works fine.
There doesn't seem to be any meaningful difference in the rendition of the page on any of these browsers. I would have to guess, though, that they are doing this based on popularity - there are probably quite a few Netscape 4.x browsers around, and those who have downloaded Mozilla most likely can go back with prehistoric Netscape.
The only explanation I have for OmniWeb is that its market share is so puny they don't know it exists yet. Oh, and I think it emulates Netscape's user agent screen precisely anyway.
Truthfully, the main MSN page is so "sell-sell-sell!" that I wouldn't care if it was vaporized off the face of the planet. No, Mr bin Laden, I don't mean that seriously. But certainly there is absolutely nothing there that would give me the slightest desire to change browsers to see it.
D
Don't visit MSN.com, even when you use IE.
It's just an Evil Plan to make it appear like there are no other browsers out there. It will be much easier to lay a claim to the entire web once 100% of the browsers reported are IE.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I just removed the fscking IE from my HD and installed a few others (Opera, Netscape, ..).
I'm gonna use these for a few weeks and then decide which one i like best.
Pitty i can't get rid of win2000( for which i didn't pay!) because of other ppl in our household.
Goddamn motherfuckers are trying to take over the internet!
What's next, My car logging into the passport Mumbo Jumbo before it starts?
hmm..... maybe up ahead.
Normally I wouldn't think this would be a good idea, but here it is anyways.
If you run a website, give a similar message to Internet Explorer browsers only. Say, "I'm sorry. Internet Explorer doesn't support a sigle web standard. (See www.w3c.org for more information on webstandards your browser ignores.) Please upgrade to Mozilla 0.9.5 or newer.
Do this on all your websites. Reccomend that users upgrade to Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Netscape, Lynx, Links, wget, anything!!! This would be hella' funny! Let them know that Internet Explorer is only designed to view msn.com, and hence will not work with any other site!! Do it!
Got friends?
For those that already use junkbuster you can easily spoof your User Agent in there so you don't have to muck around with every browser that you might want to try using.
Is there a way to configure Mozilla to report a specific user-agent string just to specific sites, similar to the way that it is possible to disable popups for specific sites?
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Taking a blatantly anti-competitive, monopolistic, action like this while in court ordered negotiations over a settlement for a conviction of monopolistic practices is beyond shooting your self in the foot. If there is ANY justice left in the US then Microsoft has just slit its own throat.
With any luck every web browser and OS company in the world will file suite against Microsoft by tomorrow morning. And, they should all win.
Stonewolf
There is no blocking of specific webclients.
There is a general blocking of anything, and
everything, which is not MSIE. It may be
that when this first aired, it was
accurate that changing a single letter would
allow the page to load successfully, but at this
point they are blocking _all_ unknown browsers.
My junkbuster setup identifies itself as GD/2.0,
primarily because I've never seen a website
that did anything useful with the client-id
besides offer me the wrong software (I'm
a multiplatform house!)
I generally get generic webpages, or stupid
front pages telling me to stay out (read
the dumb javascript, type in a URL).
So, the following browsers are rejected:
wget, w3m, mozilla, GD/2.0,
FRUITCAKECITY/9.3, etc., etc., etc.
Clearly, this is a general block of all non-IE,
rather than Opera and Mozilla specifically.
You see, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom,
knows that no one could EVER design a standards
compliant web browser but them.
That's right, wget is not standards compliant,
even though it contains NO HTML CODE AT ALL!It doesn't even have anything to do with the
'standards' they are making noise about.
Oh well, lies lies lies...
-josh
I've been playing with Proxomitron lately. I's a free Windoze "Personal Proxy" that lets you do all kinds of filtering and header/cokie manipulation. I have set it to change my User-Agent only in the *.msn.com domain. This lets me use Mozilla with MSN (I've never had the need to do so), but give the real User-Agent to all other domains.
Find Proxomitron at:
http://spywaresucks.org/prox/
All www.msn.com does is forward you to other sites. All (extrapolation from a small sample size) of these sites (msnbc, expedia, etc...) work just fine with any browser.
Most of the links are go.msn.com that just logs and redirects.
My guess is that MSN is just having fun at your (our) expense.
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
Email the people who run banners on MSN.com and explain that MS is locking out people that don't run their browser from the site, which is also locking out a good chunk of people from seeing their advertising.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
On the very web page they send to Mozilla and Opera they have a link to Advertise, which links you to Advantage Marketing at MSN. So do you think they really want to sell adds to be placed on the Upgrade Required page. Be a great place to put banners for the Linux Distribs and ./!!!
Another interesing test is to load the page into IE and then save it to disk. The load it into the other browsers and see whats the difference. Only IE gets the layout the way MS wants it. Notice that only the home page and the my MSN pages are blocked as well, so you can still go get the information someone mails a URL to (and all the popup adds as well).
Standards are simple if its my way or the highway.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
The best way around this is to post the list of phone numbers/email addresses of MSN's advertisers, and call them/write them complaining that MSN has locked them out, and if it continues to do so, then you will no longer purchase their products.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
MS is putting themselves in a very bad light with the disabled community if their site is denying access to text-based browsers. Screen readers already have had a tough time, just based on the page layout. Now they've gone and specifically denied any service to the tools many individuals with visual impairments use to stay connected to the world. Not a large community, necessarily, but still neglectful, particularly considering the advertising they do about the accessibility features of their products. Not a very smart move.
I switched the user agent in iCab to "iCab;2.5.3..." and it wouldn't let me in. NS4.7 did render though.
I say screw 'em. If they can't design a site that is compatible with a variety of browsers like every other site on the web, then they'll just lose traffic.
Like the world will stop without msn.com
Several of the sites in my school were hard coded to only do netscape 4.x, so that netscape 6 (or mozilla, which returns netscape 5) don't work. Then again, most of them give you a link to try anyway and it usually works (one that doesn't uses a little ie-specific client to download and install software, so it will probably never work in Netscape.
I've seen this all over the place. The problem is really any site that thinks you need to have IE and assumes you're too stupid to figure out how to work it otherwise.
I believe it is wrong to change the User Agent string in browsers, particularly in order to pretend to be an MS browser.
Rightly or wrongly, sites use their logs of User Agents to know how to focus their user interface designs and compatibility testing. If they have invalid or patently false information then we are doing a disservice to ourselves and the community.
It irks me that Opera (at least some version) ship with a false User Agent string, and I have always set this to the correct agent, and I think that this is a stand we must all take. The Web must be heterogenous.
now, whenever i log off of hotmail (i won't go into why i stil use it), it won't redirect me to their "please please give us your money for our half-assed, overpriced service" site.
I don't want a workaround published for this. I want Internet users to write to their congressional representatives and complain the Microsoft is abusing its monopoly powers -- again. The goal here should not be to show how you can kludge your browser into working with MSN. The goal should be to force Microsoft to stop breaking anti-trust laws.
If that doesn't work, the next best thing is to have Microsoft see a reduction in hits to its MSN site and to even lose MSN customers.
But the worst possible result of this would be for Internet users to quietly implement a workaround and allow Microsoft to get away with this.
but Microsoft has made MSN even more irrelevant than it was before.
who the fuck cares? today was the first time i've been there, and the last, just to see if omniweb viewed the page (and it did).
i don't see why everyone see why everyone is concerned about getting a workaround going so they can view that shitty site.
help out.
Netscape has blocked IE browsers because IE browsers don't support web standards.
Evidence that this is malicious blocking of particular browsers:
Now I'm wondering when my Hotmail account will stop working.wget -U "Mozilla (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows NT 5.0; Bill Gates eats worms)" http://www.msn.com returned the full index page. I was pretty offended when a high school's web site failed to return anything on IE for Mac or wget, but IE on PC gave the full page. In my view such a setup is discriminatory to people with disabilities, because they may have to use special browsers, and I'm disappointed to see MS doing the same thing just to assert themselves further in the browser market.
--hongpong.com
...msn.com displays just fine for me.
:)
Ugly as sin, but it displays.
http://pebkac.net
I bet they are blocking all the spiders too. Never come to msn after a "I feel lucky".. Good move.
I use opera almost exclusively and I got that same screen a long time ago, well I can check my mail but I can't delete any of my messages there. So therefore I continue the growing of my frustration and anger towards microsoft. As soon as I learn Linux enough to survive goodbye to windows and all of its crashing glory!
Browser Not Supported
.NET Passport does not support the Web browsing software you are using. Please use supported browsing software such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later, or Netscape Navigator versions 4.08-4.82.
.NET Passport using Netscape Navigator 6.1. We take security seriously and are working with Netscape to resolve these issues as soon as possible so that .NET Passport can support Netscape Navigator 6.1. Until that time, please use supported browsing software. We apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
Unfortunately, Microsoft®
If you use Netscape Navigator 6.1: due to possible data security issues, you cannot currently access
I got this using Mozilla 0.9.5. I noticed this when using 0.9.4. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that they are trying to covertly sway public opinion that any browser that doesn't come from Microsoft can't be trusted or simply won't work right for many sites. In other words, if you're not MS, you must suck type mentality.
It would be fair practice and equally as competitive it the rest of the sites on the internet block IE now. I would hope that
Sun, AOL, IBM, and other large corps wouldblock IE and ask the user to upgrade.
This was a real question from a job interview! Q: What area of programming do you consider yourself not to be good in?
I told Konqueror to lie.
Save the index.html file
upload it to http://validator.w3.org
After NINETEEN ERRORS ON LINE ONE, here is the last line from the output:
Sorry, this document does not validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict.
Bzzzzzt.
Searching for Truth, Justice, and the Guy Who Boosted My Wallet a Few Weeks Back....
Safeweb works fine if you're jonesing for MSN's 1337 content and you don't want to screw with your user agent (or, in the case of Opera, patch your executable, since even with "Identify as MSIE 5.0" selected, "Opera" is still contained in the user agent string and blocked).
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Is it possible to write a proxy that reports as MSIE, but converts incoming pages for compatibility for the browsers that connects to it?
Effective immediately Netscape and Mozilla browser development for the ms windows operating system has been discontinued.
Very interesting. I'm using K-Meleon, a Mozilla based Win32 browser. Using the default ID string I get that message that everyone else seems to be getting. I identify my self as using IE 6.0 (or 5.5 or 4.0) and the page renders, albeit with a ridiculously small font that is completly unreadable. If I identify as Netscape 6.1 or 4.76 it renders quite nicely. Unusual... yes?
That takes some serious balls to do on the day you release a new version of an OS that is heavily criticized for being anti-competitive.
Need some more evidence for further anti-trust cases against M$? The justice system better LART M$ before they start getting more obnoxious.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
On cnet.com they quote
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.
On the other, if you go to the w3c validator you get 4 errors for www.msn.com and msn.com.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
It only has a drop down to chose from. I have it set to IE 5.0, and still get the message.
gconftool is'nt a Galeon thing. It lets you access the gconf database, which is like the GNOME version of the Windows registry.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
(q||u|(0){7}|h) \t/}3}|#)}R\/4\\v/}3|/N/, "l0lz0r!!!!"
--
I like to watch.
IE has been losing marketshare for several months now, and Opera and Mozilla are the two browsers that have been taking most of that marketshare away from them. Microsoft is in the same position Netscape was a few years ago (far more marketshare, but with the trend turning against them) and they intend to do something about it now, while they still can.
Can't connect to www.microsoft.com with Netscape 4.75 on HPUX 11.0. I can connect to www.msn.com though. Looks like Visse chose his words carefully.
"Visse said MSN.com supports Netscape 4.7 and all later versions."
Also, msnbc.com is the only page that I have found that mozilla cannot render properly.
Send them an e-mail pointing out the incompatibility. Try to be nice.
It identifies itself as XHTML 1.0 (strict)
:P)
;D
And fails - the validator coughs up 19 errors on line one and gives up (I posted 50 earlier, but that was incorrect, it started barfing at column 50 on line one is where I got that number from
Just go in and save the file locally, then upload it to the validator to test it.
Searching for Truth, Justice, and the Guy Who Boosted My Wallet a Few Weeks Back....
How else do you fix your Windows box when it crashes? You load up Linux, go to the MS website and download a plethora of patches to get it running again.
Heh, on the bottom of the page displayed for telling us what browser to use, there's a copyright notice...
I'd be 100% confident that no one will steal their dumb tactics even if they didn't have the notice.
I just tried logging in to hotmail with Mozilla 0.9.5 running Linux, and it worked just fine.
Could it be that I'm swedish? Swedish MSN works fine on Mozilla too.
Yes, right, instead it should crash the OS or at least infect it with virii?
There is so many things programs should and should not do...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Does hotmail work fine? I couldn't care less about MSN, all that is right now is a big advertisement for Windows XP anyway.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I can understand displaying a banner on the top of each page warning that it may not display correctly. Blocking visitors out is just a heavy handed tactic to force upgrades and switching to Microsoft software.
Fradie cats. Fradie cats. Fradie cats.
I for one am heartened. Microsoft knows that people use Opera and Mozilla and Konq-- and they're frightened. They can't even pretend to compete. They so firmly believe in their own inadequacy, they design websites to compensate for it, and even their rationalizations are strangely inadequate. Faced with the prospect of existential anhiliation, they cringe.
If you meet the wabbit on the woad...
I guess I won't be reading anything on MSN anymore.
I loaded it up, set up the proxy with Mozilla 0.9.5 and then in the header filter config, I se the User Agent (out) to: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Win32; Like I would tell you what browser I'm really using.)
Some other people already seem to be using a similar user-agent trick on Linux. This is simply a Win32 implementation of what others have done already. It worked in loading www.msn.com for me on Windows 2000, Mozilla 0.9.5.
No way to leave "status bar" on by default (obviously Microsoft's way of dumbing down customer's knowledge of "links").
No way to specify a homepage with a blank launch page (obvious not-invented-here syndrome).
Bug: If you open a web site that errors out, and then you hit reload, it doesn't properly display a browser title on load.
Small things each, but enough for me. If only Mozilla rendered a little quicker.
Well, looks like I do have a use for the Microsoft Free Friday plugin :>
Heh, this is so typical Microsoft. I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner.
There are a couple different ways to take this :
1.) F*ck them attitude. Stick with your browsers and don't visit MS sites. Furthermore, try to push for a boycott of their sites. If enough people move away, then they'll have to drop it.
2.) Get IE. It ain't the worst browser in the world. It ain't the best either. (hehehe)
3.) Fool it, by changing your OS/Browser type.
4.) Boycott + 1. On your sites, don't allow Microsoft's newest browser version. Of course this is petty and childish, probably wouldn't hurt them, and would be a waste of coding effort, but an angle none the less.
5.) File a complaint and forward this to the government as proof of their anti-competitive nature. These latest actions show that even though they have been proven a monopoly, they still intend to act like one!
Since work uses IE, this probably won't affect me at all; however, I think this just another cowardly Microsoft manuever. They'll get theirs in the end.
Sorry, I don't have time to code this for Mozilla... But if MS is going to play hardball and alienate competitors customers....
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
"We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards."
;-)
HMM it strikes me as kinda ironic:
d) ive just found a bug in mozilla i thing so off to bugzilla
c) micrsoft says "latest technology" micorsoft means "somthing we just made up randomly to make everything else not work with our monoploising software"
b) X in a standard (EG XHTML) (normaly) stnads for eXtension so is optional and you _SHOULD_ (read html specs for defintion of should) be able to work without it so thats probably not complying with standards
a) Microsoft are well know for their strict adherense to standards
Makes me wonder how the site treats spiders. Is Google unable to index the pages of MSN because of this?
MSN is fine under OmniWeb on Mac OS X. The default browser settings:
AppName: Netscape
AppCodeName: Mozilla
AppVersion: 4.5 (Macintosh; I; PPC; Nav)
Platform: MacPPC
Until reading this article I'd never bothered with MSN. First impressions last - I won't be going back!
I hardly ever go to MSN, but if I need to do it (for some bizarre reason) in the future, my version of Konqueror will tell 'em that it's running IE 5.5 (because it has to say that...), on Linux (because it is ;-).
Anyone wanting to do something similar can change the settings of their /usr/share/services/useragentstrings/ie55onwinnt5. desktop file, simply replacing any occurances of Windows 2000 with Linux 2.4.
See this ./ story:
The America Online Protocol Revealed
Posted by timothy on Tue 09 Oct 02:12PM from the you've-got-something dept. Gods Misfit writes "The America Online protocol(Connecting, Logging In, Joining Chats, etc..) has remained a mystery for most of its life. The only way one could log into their AOL account was via the AOL software. A few months ago, some people set out to break down the AOL protocol and open the door for alternative America Online software. This document is the result: The AOL Protocol. A sign on example for Visual Basic programmers has been written and is available here." I suspect a fair number of people never try Linux or one of the BSDs because they're oderately happy with AOL as an ISP, and switching OSes would mean switching ISPs at the same time. A shame that AOL doesn't make this kind of information more easily available.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Errors/warnings in http://www.msn.com/
line 1, char 280: Unknown XHTML attribute topmargin
line 1, char 280: Unknown XHTML attribute leftmargin
Also doesn't seem to validate too well with the W3C HTML validator either.
Standards indeed.
Now if only X10 would follow suit...
"Love is never saying you're too proud." -Tonic
just an FYI, don't kill me. It's not my fault. I just checked. IE 5.5 with the latest patches worked, what a shock.
I'm forced into m$ by work not by choice. The IBM 560z they gave me is a pain in the butt to get any Linux loaded. The damned PCMCIA external CD-rom drive and external floppy keep going into power-save during an install or large file transfer (m$ products also).
Linux rocks! Long live the Resistance!
It's their website, so they're fully entitled to shut out /block whatever they please. Also, the website is free, you don't pay for it, nor does it hold vital information, for example government information etc. If your favorite pub suddenly has a new doorpolicy and you are not welcome anymore since you don't wear a rolex watch, you can get mad, but that's about all you can do.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I just tried to access MSN.com using Netscape 4.7.2 on HP-UX 11... lol, the browser completely crashes.
One of Mozilla's primary goals is to be 100% standards compliant. It is FAR more in tune with standards than a lot of the other browsers (though I will admit that IE does support a very large deal of them). So the fact that Mozilla wouldn't render the pages correctly is pretty much crap. Oh wait...They meant MS standards...I guess I read that wrong.
They've just blocked access to the home page. You can go to their sites list and get just about everywhere. Though, why you'd want to is beyond me....
For crying out loud guys. It's MSN for god's sake. The Microsoft Network not the internet. Complaining that you can't get in is like whining about not being able to ride the kiddies rollercoaster at the state A&P show because your too tall.
From the Yahoo article, Mr. Visse of MSN marketing stated that "All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard." However (IIRC), the W3C standard for web browsers states that a browser it to ignore any tags it does not know how to handle. This being the case, then, there is no reason to disallow a browser, since it should ignore anything it does not know.
Also, I can confirm I received the message trying Mozilla 0.94, lynx 2.8.4dev.16. and direct telnet to port 80.
They also block early versions of their own 'net browsers under Windows. IE 2.0 gets the "Upgrade" page as well.
From the Yahoo article:
"We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards."
Ok, that would be reasonable except for the fact that the MSN.com homepage isn't even valid XML... much less valid XHTML.
Running that piece of shit through the w3c HTML validator brings back at least 25 errors.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Even when you get past their detection page, the MSN homepage isn't valid XHTML; they don't close some img elements, and use UPPERCASE img and hrefs throughout.
They don't want me at MSN, I don't want them on my box. Sounds ok to me. Who needs their overpriced OS and their "services" (read: more ways to steal your privacy and money) anyway?
Dunno, just tried on win2k pro sp2 with netscape 4.73: http://www.msn.com, and no errors, just the page as it is on my IE6. This netscape install is identifying itself as netscape, no proxy is altering the ID string.
Weird... anyone else has the same results?
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
The trouble with this fix is that it will cause the server to serve up IE specific code rather than w3c compliant code at whatever site you visit. Any browser detection code will incorrectly assume that you use IE and provide you with the appropriate HTML. Quite a bad thing if you have a browser that can do a good job of displaying w3c compliant stuff but is not bug for bug compatible with whatever MS chose to implement.
Jilles
As per the MS in the article, Netscape 4.77 seems to work just fine.
Mark
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
Oddly enough I can't access MSN.com with Mozilla. However, I can access MSN.com's media kit.
I think you've hit on it exactly. Choice.
The customer may choose any color car he wants, so long as it is black.
Yesterday i could choose to view MSN with mozilla. Tomorrow I can choose to view MSN with IE.
So that is our problem. This is one of thousands of "choices" Microsoft is making for everybody.
Or have I just been trolled?
Do we blast Microsoft for locking out the competition yet again, or do we simply make fun of them for being too incompetent create a functional website?
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I would like to return the favour and block IE/MSN
Explorer from my websites, but my ISP does not believe
in MS-free Fridays.
Not being a javascript coder, I'm having a hard time putting
together code which will do this reliably. Would some
javascript whiz out there be willing to post suitable code
for me (and other like-minded persons)?
I'm changing all of my web browsers' home pages to the following string:
y ou _give_Mozilla_access_to_MSN
// www.msn.com / I_wont_buy_Windows_XP_ until_you_give_Mozilla_access_to _MSN
http://www.msn.com/I_wont_buy_Windows_XP_until_
(readable version:
http:
)
When they see a few hundred thousand hits on that in their statistics, maybe they'll think twice. . .
Notice that this didn't "go live" (except in Brazil) until it was too late for Microsoft's competitors to use it to get an injunction against XP? Now that XP is out, MS thinks there's nothing serious the courts can hold over their heads.
Yeah, right. By the way, what is that MSN thing?
I have heard the name sometimes, but i never had the impression that it's something that i will ever need.
The Problem that bother's me are all those nice websites that have browser-specific code for netscape and ie but don't know about galeon, mozilla, lynx, links etc.
There's no need of suspicious theories about MS paying them for it. It works as simple as this:
boss hands a list of features to the coders
coders try to get a fast implementation that works on bosses computer
coders say they need some more time to make it portable to mozilla, galeon, lynx, etc.
boss does not know what they are talking about, thinks they just want to spend time watching porn
boss hands them a list with new features.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
It's not that this is a monopolisic practice, it's that it's false advertising. They're trying to convince people to "upgrade" to the latest version of their product on the completely, undeniably false premise that all competetor's products are incapable of showing certain web pages properly. I'm using Mozilla 0.9.5 on Linux, and after applying a workaround, I found that the MSN page loaded and displayed properly. The only browser I can think of that MIGHT not display a remotely well-designed page correctly is Netscape 4.x. Presenting IE as the only competent browser is blatantly untrue, and false advertising is illegal.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
I think it's probably closer to 90% myself
They seem to accept anything matching
Mozilla.*\(compatible; MSIE [4-6]\.\d+.*.
... using a non-6.0 version of MSIE to access MSN? You know, MSIE 4.0 or so. The "Don't come here!" message says that it has to be the lastest version of IE to to get the standards compliance (yada yada yada). But would they really be serious enough about this to block their own (albeit embarassingly clodgy) browser?
On my machine, IE (in win98) crashes about twice as often as Mozilla (in Linux) does. If MS wants to ensure the optimal user experience they should block their own browser.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I just noticed the same problem with the Opera web browser after reading this article.
You're right, and we face this on the internet every day. Say I visit a site that says that to view the site, I need Macromedia Shockwave. Well, if I really want to view the site, I'll download Macromedia Shockwave. If I want to say, "Screw that...I'm not going to give Macromedia the edge in my WWW viewing," that's my right as well.
But here's the problem: Microsoft isn't saying, "Hey, we use special things here, and if you want to view the webpage, you need this special software." No, Redmond's saying this:
"We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards."
Well, let's just go visit Mozilla.org's website for a second...if you look here, you'll read at the top of the page that, Mozilla has good support for XML. Several World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendations and drafts from the XML family of specifications are supported, as well as other related technologies.
So, Mozilla supports XHTML, but for some strange reason, msn.com says it doesn't. As Chris Farley would say, "Hmm...That's a mystery!"
Oh, this is good! Check this out...
Okay, folks, here's the kicker. While I was looking around at this, a thought occured to me. Let's just go down and check out www.w3c.org and see if the guys who made the standards actually say that MSN is playing by their rules. So, this lead me to W3's Validation site, where I typed in www.msn.com into the XHTML validation field, here's what I got in return (abridged, but the key points are there)...
URL: www.msn.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content Length: 1462
Detected Character Encoding: utf-8
Document Type: XHTML 1.0 Strict
Below are the results of checking this document for XML well-formedness and validity.
...(four errors listed, but omitted for space)
Sorry, this document does not validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict.
If you use CSS in your document, you should also check it for validity using the W3C CSS Validation Service.
---
But nothing, nothing comes close to just proving how dirty Microsoft is playing than this statement right here at the bottom of the page: (- character used to show XHTML script included in webpage)
---
Below is the source input I used for this validation:
1: -?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?--!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"--html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Attention: Web Browser Upgrade Required to View MSN.com-/title--base href="http://go.msn.com/"
If you are seeing this page, we have detected that the browser that you are using will not render MSN.com correctly. Additionally, you'll see the most advanced functionality of MSN.com only with the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or MSN Explorer. If you wish to visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below.
- Internet Explorer for Windows
- Internet Explorer for Macintosh
- MSN Explorer for Windows
©2001 Microsoft Corporation.ÂÂAll rights reserved.Terms of UseAdvertiseTRUSTe Approved Privacy StatementGetNetWise---
Can you believe this? MSN actually told the W3C standard comittee that their own standards did not work with MSN! That's a laugh riot right there.
So, Case in Point: If Microsoft were to flat out say, "Hey! We don't care about you guys with the other browsers! Our website only looks good with IE and that's the way it's going to be," then I'd grumble and go on with my business. But Microsoft says that they're conforming to the standards presented in XHTML by W3C, when in fact W3C says that www.msn.com does not comply with their standards.
This is outright monopolization at it's worst.
You shouldn't be using MSN or Hotmail anyway! When you go to MSN or HotMail, you are putting money directly into Bill's pocket. Advertising revenue etc. drives these sites' profits. DON'T GO THERE AT ALL. There is absolutely no excuse to be using these sites. There are many good Microsoft-free alternatives.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
In the your mozilla\defaults\pref directory open the all.js file for editing and add this line:
pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)");
I added it below the:
pref("general.useragent.misc", "rv:0.9.5"); line
You can view the msn.com/.ca pages but the rendering is a little off.(It's not that I actually use the msn sites but they pissed me off so I had to get them working).
BTW...I am using the 2001101117 build
I think you all forgot that Netscape started this "let's take HTML and add our own crap to it" business. Now that's Microsoft's doing it, there's a big hue and cry over it all. Can you say "double standard"?
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Seems like win32 netscapes work ok on www.msn.com. Does 6.1 on other platforms work too or not?
Anyway: if you don't like it that www.msn.com blocks you, visit www.yahoo.com, same stuff, different url. Microsoft then gets less hits, less adds, less money etc, you get the point. That's what a lot of people here want, don't they? so why the whining?
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
This also works if you have a version of IE "Provided by X Company" and you don't want to advertise that company. Anyways, here's how to get to it (at least in Win2K)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Internet Explorer -> Main -> Window Title
Currently, mine says "It looks better in Mozilla"
Forgot to convert the damned tags. Ugh.
Basically when including your style sheet, set media="all" in the external sytle sheet link. Netscape will then totally ignore the style and render everything styleless.
Funny, that. Especially as it looks virtually identical to the www.msn.com site...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I just setup a very small page which contains screenshots of a small set of browsers displaying the msn.com website. you can find it here:
msn browser comparison
--
history is an illusion caused by the passage of time and time is an illusion caused by the passage of history.
They aren't just blocking OS'es that have IE available.
Mozilla 0.9.5 for OS/2 is blocked, and there is no I.E. for OS/2.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
Hey! /. who probably will get fired some day soon anyhow. It's a quick hack and there is also a apache module out that denies MSIE access to the site on Fridays.
Why don't you (slashdot) block IE? Btw, there is a lot of system administrators reading
It's more than IE wanting to render the site in an IE specific way.
As anyone who develops web pages knows: IE is the biggest monstrosity for making pages viewable by all. They don't follow all the standards and their implementation is always full of bugs. Maybe in the lastest versions (I only test pages with IE5.5sp2) they finally got it together but last time I checked they still haven't figured out how to do things like CSS margins and inheritance decently (which seems pretty basic to me).
MS likes to do what it wants and have standards be written according to their implementation. I can't believe they, of all companies, are saying that mozilla doesn't comply to W3C standards.
the princess
Can you imagine what happens, when the hackers break in, read the schema of the database and run a SQL query that will swap the cards in wallets of random 1% of users?
Once the users will find out and all will ask to return their transactions, you can bet there will be companies filling for bancrupcy like mad! This could put under ground even some banks, is it in the very interest of these banks to make the credit card system so vulnerable? And should not the insurance companies base their quotes on the amount of credit cards entered into M$ Wallet sytem? These are just few questions...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
It doesn't look like anything nefarious on MSN's part, just sloppy browser-specific web coding
i can get moz 0.9.5 anywhere in msn but the home page so it cant be bad coding it has to be deliberate just do hotmail.msn.com or any of their other XXXXX.msn.com and you can go anywhere but the home page
Yeah, it's self-serving and perhaps borderline unethical. But it's not illegal (yet)
Actually, it may very well be illegal. Their control of the market makes their actions subject to antitrust constraints that most of us are not under. It's not clear whether this is a violation of monopoly power...but it might well be. So no, I don't think it's fair to say for sure that it's not illegal.
I'm not making an argument about whether anti-trust law is fair, or about whether MS will face legal action because of this. I'm just saying that, for a company which has been convicted of breaking this law in the past, they seem very unconcerned about breaking it in the future.
If I were a Microsoft stockholder, I wouldn't be happy. It doesn't seem to me that getting repeatedly smacked down by the world's most powerful government is likely to increase shareholder value.
It doesn't work when opera ID's itself as Opera, or MSIE 5.0 (can't understand why?). Can someone check this? It also fails through anonymizer.com (through any browser). I hate designers who think they know better than me.
I wanna findout where in London Billy G (or Bald-head) are staying so i can send the boys 'round to sort 'im out.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Ahuk, ahuk, ahuk...
Ah, yes, that's it... emoticons and photo editing, that's why they're chucking off competing browsers! Well, I must say, that's really worthwhile...
Well, now, ain't that a peach? Reading between the lines, in order to have reliability, you need to be running in a totally Microsoft-controlled environment. From the people who brought your SirCam, CodeRed and Nimda? Yeeeah, suuuure...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Think about it for a second. It takes very little time or effort for competent, professional web designers to produce a site that supports a second browser, and each browser after the second requires less effort than the one before. Are you REALLY trying to claim that it makes sense for large companies to sacrifice 10%, 5%, or even 1% of their revenue just to save a few man-hours of work? That's the *entire* profit margin for many long-established businesses.
I use the MSN as a start page, but if they're going to start blocking other browsers (purposely), I guess I'll have to find another page. It's a good strategy, I suppose, make it inconvenient to use competitive tools and the vast majority of the people will ignorantly follow along. But I'll use the only means at my disposal to register my discontent, I'll go stare at someone else's growing advertisement banners.
Gconftool is your friend:
/apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent --type=string "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; oops, wrong! it's:) Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/0.12.5 (Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20011012"
Try: gconftool -s
--
Failure is a human trait. Luckily, I'm not human
1. requiring MSIE users to upgrade to version 4 or above
"Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.0; anything)"
DONT WORK
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; anything)"
WORK
2. specifically barring browsers "masquerading" as MSIE (such as Opera)
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; anything) Opara 5.12"
WORK
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; anything) Opera 5.12"
DONT WORK
3. restricting access only to some specific other browsers (such as some versions of Netscape)
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22smp i686; en-US; m18) Gecko/20010110 Netscape6/6.5"
WORK
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22smp i686; en-US; m18) Gecko/20010110 Netscope6/6.5"
DONT WORK
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22smp i686; en-US; m18) Gecko/20010110 Netscape6.5"
DONT WORK
It's definitely thought and done on purpose...
now, do i get to setup my own 900 number?
its funny that
:-)
http://advantage.msn.com/home/home.asp
will load in Mozilla [on win32]
but
http://www.msn.com
won't....
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
[image link] Internet Explorer 6 also fails to render MSN correctly.
I normally run Mozilla on this box, but keep a copy of IE up-to-date out of habit. Seems like those pesky MSN rendering problems aren't Mozilla sspecific at all...
Seriously, the best response that I think anyone could take would be to send an email to MSN's advertisers (I noticed Citibank, Fidelity, and Ameritrade on one page alone) and express your displeasure with not being able to access MSN, and point out that Microsoft has made it impossible for a significant number of potential customers to be exposed to their adverts.
Personally, I'll stick to other media outlets. MSN has always struck me as one of the MTVs of the 'net: shiny, annoying, and geared towards someone with the intelligence and attention span of a fourteen year old. (Read: most of the US population.)
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here are a few that i use:
www.aeontrek.com = No time for the old in and out love, just came to check the meter!
www.gothic.net = American Lurkers ( Waiting For Sexbot 6.9 )
www.boortz.com = Hey Neal!
www.rackspace.com = Damn you! I have flash!!
www.slashdot.org = CowDung/5.3 (compatible; CowDung 5.3; BillyWorld 3.11; Kicing it on a C64 )
www.warsteiner-usa.com = Love da beer!
www.cnn.com = leftist jerks
www.citibank.com = 24.9 precent intrest my ass!! You're fired!!
www.debian.org = debian rocks!!
www.somethingawful.com = Good name for your content.
www.computerjobs.com = I just got laid off, can you help me?
www.ebay.com = Woohoo!!!
www.foxnews.com = What does it matter? You're going to crash knoqueror anyways.
And for msn.com:
www.msn.com = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5 sucks; Linux 2.4.13; User agents are meaning less!!!)
I say we let MSN know what we think. They only check for ' Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE [4|5|6].[0-9] ' and nothing past that.
The journey is better then the end.
Funny, since I switched to Netscape 6.1 I haven't
had a browser crash once.
-lp
Why pick Nike instead of Monsanto or Dow or Lockheed Martin? Thousands of clothing companies do what Nike does.
Does anyone remember when Microsoft reported that Quartdeck's product QEMM would no longer work with the next version of windows.
And it didn't.
Unless you renamed QEMM.SYS to something else, like QEMM386.SYS, then it worked again.
Microsoft is again relying on dirty tricks to wear the user down and not innovation as encouragement.
All this is going to do is make clients lie about who they are. This taints the statistics and hampers other systems that require this information for providing features.
The interesting news is that if you click on the other MSN links they provide on the "you can't access this site" page, such as oh... advertising... then suddenly it works.
Has anyone tried MSN with their latest browser and see if it, and only it, really renders "correctly?" Heck, if Microsoft wanted to limit their audience, why not invent a whole different set of tags? Embrace and extend... but not too much that it attracts legal attention.
Do the relevant standards permit the client identifier to be used for discrimination? Maybe they should prohibit that.
I doubt that Microsoft is being honest about their reason for refusing service to non Microsoft browser users. I suppose it will all be explained in court.
If this turns out to be another illegal monopoly abuse, then I hope the court revokes any patents and copyrights involved in the crime. Maybe a good general remedy for Microsoft abuses would be to prohibit them from holding any patents or copyrights at all, for a few years.
------DO NOT WRITE BELOW THIS LINE------
I use IE5.5 on Win98 but block all user agent queries with my firewall (AtGuard). In my firewall settings for msn.com I inserted the following string to reply to user agent queries: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows 95). Works like a charm.
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
Netscape v4.61 for OS/2 renders just fine.
Mozilla/IBM Web Browser for OS/2 is blocked.
Gents:
/dotrap had a look at msn.com --- noproblemo ... ya musta scared the BoRg.
I'm running NS_4.78 and after seeing this
I tried to run the page through the HTML validator but noticed that it just checks the page suggesting IE so I download the source using the OmniWeb, and ran validator on that. I got 20 errors.
Couldn't you just use Opera and change what it identifies itself as? I know this works on other sites that give a similar message.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
The advertising/marketing page still works. Wonder why that is? :-)
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
When will they change the http , so only ie can be served pages....
/K
$ lynx -source -useragent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 98)"
http://www.msn.com | tidy
Tidy (vers 4th August 2000) Parsing console input (stdin)
line 1 column 2156 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 2401 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 2660 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&url"
line 1 column 2947 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 3241 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 4753 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 5111 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 5820 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 5985 - Warning: discarding unexpected </input>
line 1 column 6117 - Warning: discarding unexpected </input>
line 1 column 6479 - Warning: discarding unexpected </input>
line 1 column 11241 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 11351 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 12021 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 14012 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 15526 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 16920 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 1 column 17360 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 4 column 361 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 4 column 561 - Warning: discarding unexpected </input>
line 4 column 615 - Warning: discarding unexpected </input>
line 4 column 914 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 4 column 1228 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 4 column 2740 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 4 column 4421 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 4 column 4660 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 4 column 6046 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 4 column 6234 - Warning: discarding unexpected </input>
line 4 column 6288 - Warning: discarding unexpected </input>
line 4 column 6518 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
stdin: Doctype given is "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
stdin: Document content looks like XHTML 1.0 Transitional
30 warnings/errors were found!
Maybe its a programming glitch ? who knows ? i can think of countless other sites that dont work properly on different browsers including some that wont work properly on IE - i would think (and not to be an MS apologist here BUT) we should wait for a few hours and see what happens.
Any of us should know that a move or change in any architecture can cause problems even for MS - the fact that it is MS is what leads people to claim conspiracy theories and proclaim death to Bill Gates, honestly if everyone stopped worrying about what MS is doing and started worrying about getting Linux and other open souurce stuff to a totally stable basis where we can roll it out on the desktop then we would all be better off and MS would be hurting a lot more.
I wonder if there was a similar problem at sourceforge if we would see the same violent protests an attacks on the company - i dont think so.
Lets all stop looking over our shoulder and start lookin at the future
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Then we'll see some complaining.
IE doesn't even have the ability to change it's user-agent.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Since we (Amigas) are the forgotten few on the internet are browsers
have always had a "spoof" mode that let us send any browser ID we
wish.
The MSN appears happily enough using:
mozilla/4.6(compatiable;AmigaVoyager;AmigaOS)
Obviously M$ are preparing for the day when every PC, laptop, PDA
WebTV Game Console and watch runs Windoze. Me, I just foolish.
The small fish swim amongst the sleeping leviathons.
Regards
Just my two cents... but why on earth are people here so keen to bypass this "protection" to MSN. Since when did /. users worry so much about accessing MSN? Or maybe we are just seeing if MSN can handle the /. effect =P (Damn... it's holding up...)
On a side note, I can interestingly access the MSN successfully using Netscape 6.1 for windows
In the Yahoo article:
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.
What a bunch of lies. I just ran Amaya, the browser from the W3C, against msn.com and it didn't work, not even when run on a Windows platform. Does Microsoft now claim that W3C != W3C ?
I'm sorry people. Microsoft just fucking SUCKS!
Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
It's great. Even when running a 'non-compliant' browser, you can still click the 'advertising' link for M$N. You may not be good enough to view their site, but you can still send them money.
~~~
Well looking at todays slashdot
.NET)
1. obligatory anti microsoft evil bill gates non event bullshit story - in this case about MSN a site many of the linux bigots on here would never even think of visiting - 966 spittle flecked irrational and often redundant comments
2. Second obligatory anti MS story - In this case about XP and containing the sort of vicious, violent, unbalancned and plain incorrect comments that we have come to expect on slashdot (oh and Activation is a dead issue guys - this product is light years ahead of any other windows - be afraid) - 1055 even more spittle flecked and abusive comments
3. A discussion on web ratings - an issue that may actually have a major effect on the real internet we use - 224 comments (counting the obligatory trolls and morons)
4.An interesting artcile on how open source stinks at error handling (something thats very true - it also stinks at understandable documentation, installation of software, ease of setup etc etc) - 54 comments (its early but i would eat my hat if it gets over 200 comments
Lets not beat around the bush - just change the name os the site from slashdot to Die MS Die.com and be done with it - i used to come here for meaningfull news on many ineteresting subjects - noe every day i see stories like these and at least one MS story to get you all lathered up no matter how erroneus the story really is (the Linux VS Win comparison yesterday was so biased it read like an MS statement on
Linux needs a lot of concreted effort to stabilise it and package it for the moms and dads and corporate world - yet you sit here spitting bile about a competitor who has just brought out a product that will put some companies out of busienss (it IS that good trust me) without attempting to learn from it and see what consumers REALLY want rather than what you THINK they want.
Who made you guys all superior anyway?
I'm not sure what's up, but it looks like they fixed it. MSN.COM loads fine for me now. It was giving me the error page around an hour ago.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Okay, I have a legacy hotmail account, at least now after I log out the page doesn't take so long to load. Another fine innovation by microsoft, the all text page.
If they don't want your hits and your eyeballs because you're using a better browser than IE, why go out of your way to give them your business? This is worse than those people who whine about the RIAA and MPAA and then have massive DVD and CD collections. Go elsewhere for your news, like cnn.com or many others - who apparently *do* want your eyeballs and patronage.
Another thing - whenever I used to go to msn.com it would redirect me to the local msn - ninemsn.com.au (Australia's version of).
After the *upgrade* I'm no longer redirected. Those outside the US can finally view the US-msn without being pushed towards the localised version. Yay?
*** I am the real stylewagon
I'd like to see *nix lovers and advocates start creating strictly 100% compliant w3c web pages that display similar error messages whenever a web browser that doesn't entirely complies with m3c get the page. Slowly, the number of 100% w3c web pages will grow, the number of web pages with good, interesting and important content will grow. The internet may be polarized so many users will complain and opt for a mature, full breed OS with 30 years of pedigree.
Within the past few weeks, iTools moved to WebDAV standards (with a couple silly problems, I know, but it works, OK?) so now any platform can get there.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
you see, they have this thing called a 'monopoly' on presonal computer operating systems. You can have one of those, but you have to be really careful about what you do or it's 'illegal'.
Trying to spread your monopoly in one area to another is illegal, and preventing smaller competitors from competing in established or new fields is illegal. NO question. Now what was yours, again?
I faked my UserAgent string using Proxomitron, and I got into the site with Mozilla 0.9.5. Every MSN page I checked except the front fage renders correctly. The front page has a rendering bug where text in the center frame is squished into the lower left corner.
Very suspicious. Does this remind you of the DR-DOS an Win 3.x intentional bug?
I just tried to access msn.com with
lynx
and I don't even get to see the rejected
message unless I download and examine
the text file they send.
As soon as I noticed this article, I tried msn.com in every web browser I had in front of me, that is, IE5.5, Mozilla (0.9.5) and Netscape 4.7. Of course, msn.com gave that error message that is getting so many hits today to my Mozilla attempt. However, I noticed several display problems with Netscape 4.7; the "Windows XP" logo was broken and there were some other minor display problems. I saved the page to a file and opened up the file in IE. Surprisingly, the same broken Windows XP logo and other display problems persisted in IE. That, (not to mention the extremely prolonged render time in NS4.7) indicates to me that some Microsoft programmers were not discouraged by Microsoft to have a little fun breaking the page in Netscape.
Somebody please try it and post results/screenshots on a webserver so everyone can see!
And why the hell does he think he can post in the story body instead of in the follow-ups like everyone else?
First, a rant about slashdot...
:) . And I'm willing to bet that most Slashdotters will do it, because this site is important to them. It is more important, certainly, than MSN. So maybe this site, and the only other large userbase, nerd-friendly site, I know; everything2.com should begin the boycott. These sites create a sense of attachment to its users, and they're not just going to walk away because they have to download a different browser. One of the effects of this "rule" is, if we already use Mozilla/Opera for our main browsing activities (slashdot and everything2), we're not going to just close it up and load IE to look at other sites, we are most likely going to stick with the same browser to view other sites. Unfortunately, another effect is that the sites are not likely to get any new readers, because if you saw a link to Slashdot and it was going to be your first time visiting it, and you click it in your IE window and you get "Use Mozilla or go away!", you're not going to bother downloading Mozilla to see what this one measly unheard-of-before site has to offer. If we were to expand the boycott, perhaps ask AOL to join the boycott and IE users will no longer be able to view CNN.com. The chances of this happening is, of course, highly unlikely. Other popular sites are mostly out of the question. Portals like Yahoo! would fear losing even more of their viewers to MSN.
.NET . I can't believe anyone will still want to do business with them! Especially if their idea is a subscription based service that worsens your bottom line! At home, I use Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer because I got used to them (NS 4.7 got crummier while IE got better), I use Office and Outlook 2000, but I really have paid very little for them, I pirated them and I'm willing to admit it. They are quite excellent products, but this fucked up marketing strategy is going to kill Microsoft; if I were running a business and have to use legal software, no way I'm going to waste my money on their stuff, especially if every Melissa, ILoveYou, JLo, Kournikova, SirCam (they're mostly user education problems, but at least if the secretary opens that love letter attachment in Linux, nothing horrible will happen), Code Red and Nimda is going to cost me even some more money, especially during these times when money is tight! (This gives me an idea for an ad for open-source, but who in the open-source can afford it, IBM maybe?, an ad that goes "Its unstable, 2 lines of code is enough to root it, it sends your files to other people, and you have to pay monthly subscription to have it!").
The counter has reached 600 comments and it's going.. but it gets pretty repetitive after a few dozen..
- Either: "It still works on browser x on platform y!"
- Or: "It doesn't work on browser x on platform y, just like you said it wouldn't, but I still had to see it to believe it, and while I'm at it, I'll post my findings, who cares if it's fucking redundant!"
- Or: "Just change the user-agent string! Click 'Preferences'.. bla bla bla."
And now, some thoughts (which may also be redundant, but as you can see, I really didn't feel like reading 600 variations of the three above to see if someone else has posted this)...
This is an interesting move by Microsoft. msn.com got a new designed on the day that Windows XP got launched, and blocks popular browsers. They block Opera, Mozilla, Linux browsers but not older versions of Netscape. I'd throw a guess that they are still letting users of older Netscape in because these people aren't the group that is ever going to upgrade anyway (computer illiterates, hardware limitation, policy of whoever owns the computer in the first place). Interestingly, these people are also more likely to still have home.netscape.com (which incidently has link on their front page to an article or two about Windows XP) as their startup page. MSN says the browsers are blocked because they are not standards compliant. This is a very weak reasoning. If so, how come they are only blocking the few popular browsers and not (the less compliant) NS 4.7? And whose bloody fucking standards are they talking about? IE isn't even 100% w3c standards compliant, and the other browsers can display their page properly anyway (as some slashdotters [who have now been touted by me as being redundant, yes I too am inconsisent] claim), so they are being hypocritical.
MSN also used to have a "Online Contacts" ActiveX applet, which interacted with the MSN "Steal AOL/ICQ users through forceful repeated nagging advertising on our monopoly web-based mail service" Messenger to display your Messenger contact list on their front page. It's not there anymore. Is it gone because ActiveX isn't standards-compliant, and keeping it would make their standards-compliance-exclusivity, well, hypocritical?
Or is it, like someone have said, just a temporary page because they weren't able to complete in time the hacks that would make their site render "compatibly" in Opera/Mozilla? I downloaded the msn.com page and viewed it using the other browsers. In Opera 5.12, the layout looked almost right, in Mozilla 0.9.1, less right. Netscape 4.7 crashed, and I can't believe I have 4 browsers installed!
What can we do against it? I would suggest boycotting IE by blocking them when they visit us ("us" being anyone with a website). Of course this isn't a very viable option. For one thing, as it has been often and sadly claimed, the majority of internet users use IE. MSN blocking non-IE browsers will only reduce its viewership by a few people who don't upgrade. But if a major site, for example Slashdot, blocks IE, it risks losing a lot more, and that's not something any company is willing to risk - especially during this shaky economical time. But I would like to put forward the idea, that we should just gamble it. If they haven't done so, downloading and installing Mozilla will not be a big hassle to most Slashdot readers anyway (unless they're at work and have no right to do so, in which case maybe they should switch jobs.
Of course, it's silly to play these games and render the web even more unusable. Of course a lot of us dream of showing it to Microsoft (reminds me of the scene in Braveheart where the Scottish warriors lifted up their kilts to insult the English soldiers), so why not just risk it? And if it doesn't work, there's always admitting defeat, and stop the boycott, although you'd have to face the jeerings of those who didn't bother to do anything about Microsoft fucking up their internet in the first place.
On the other hand, I wonder if Microsoft has thought out this plan very well. MSN is "yet another portal" anyway, that would not have a lot of viewers if it were not set as the home page on every install/upgrade of Internet Explorer (which, because it was embedded in the monopoly OS, has a monopoly of users) and the default redirect-after-logout page of Hotmail (the most used (the monopoly in) web-based email). It's obvious they are very interested in standardizing everybody to IE and (they hope) Windows XP, in preparation for
Someone just have to really make Microsoft's customers aware of its track record, and let Microsoft continue slitting its own throat, until they wise up, fix their holes and start playing fairly.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
If they just came out and said "You have to use a Microsoft browser to use this Microsoft site simply because we want you to," I could stomach it a lot easier that this shit where they're supposedly looking out for my best interest and concerned that I'm not using a compliant browser.
Well, thanks dad, but I can take care of myself.
I'll get over it.
1. go to www.msn.com
2. click on the "advertise" link at the bottom of the page.
3. click on any other part of msn.com. the only page you can't see is the "MSN Home" page at www.msn.com/index.html
I'm also getting Konqueror blocked by the site. Out of curiosity I set my agent string to:
"bogus/made-up browser"
And that got blocked too. So it is NOT maintaining a blacklist, but rather it is maintaining a whitelist, which is even worse from a proprietary lock-in standpoint.
It doesn't just refuse certain browsers. It's denying all browsers except a select few.
MS == Pompus twits.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
This is weird. I'm in a campus lab now [on a Mac no less - bleh], but last night, I was using HoTMail and MSN just fine using a recent nightly form the 0.9.5-trunk [on Win2K - my IE5.5 has taken a total crap anyway]. Not like I go to either site that often, but this is uncool, to say the least.
Just wait till I switch mom over to Linux, then we'll be able to wage a mediocre opposition.
-bZj
.sig
From the Yahoo! News story:
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing
So how come http://validator.w3.org doesn't agree?
And yet: this1 is what the w3c validator thinks of www.msn.com
"Sorry, this document does not validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict." - W3C validator.
Tarkwyn.
I posted this at mozillazine.org and Mozillanews.org
--o--o-
Speaking of which.. I have changed Mozilla's UserAgent (UA) to spoof as IE5.5 and 6 for windows, and it looks terrible, then for IE5 for Mac, and it loads very similar to ie6 (minus bg and text changes do to MS crappy coding), also have tried as ns6.1 you can also get in, and it looks good.. about the same as the spoof for IE5 Mac.. wierd...
I did this quite easily with a "useragent toolbar" made for Mozilla, that allows you to change your UA.. It's pretty cool.. once you change your UA, just open a new window (CTRL-N) and it works.. PLEASE don't permanatly change your UA.. as we need people to see we are using mozilla... but it is good for getting into sites that are ie only (www.msn.com), to prove they work fine on Mozilla.
UserAgent ToolBar (http://www.illsley.org/useragent.shtml)
Please USE WISELY!!
Cheers --Jedbro
A) MSN.com sucks.
B) It's not the first site that locks out non-IE browsers, and it won't be the last. But, since A), who cares.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
I just blocked all MSIE browsers from my site. They get a lengthy story about why MSIE is bad and that there are good alternatives for them. If you want to read it, just go here with MSIE or just read the page they get redirected to here
It will probably severely cut the amount of visitors, but I don't advertise anything (I don't have banners) and I don't sell anything. So I got nothing to lose. Microsoft can take their browser and go to hell for all I care. My target audience will probably never notice.
Oh, and take it easy on that web server :)
did you even notice that that news story
is IDENTICAL to the link above?
Microsoft apparently had a change of stance after the backlash surrounding the blocking.
i ran msn.com through the validator at w3c.org. as you can see from the result, the validator doesn't even get through (as has been said before). but it is as easy to see that not even their 'sorry your web browser does not support this site' is not w3c standards compliant!
i would post the output of the validator, but hey, the 'lameness filter' killed that idea in a heartbeat.
-sam
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
msn.com.br looks much like msn.com "new" design. It even lets in my Opera browser AND (surprise, surprise) it even renders perfectly with their little "slashboxes" and all...
Fuck it, most of the redesign of MSN was converting to CSS. Haakon Wium Lie, the inventor of CSS even works for Opera Software. How's that for poetic justice ?
Not that I ever visit msn anyways...
Bodø community site
I'm running Mozilla on Linux and I use:
Mozilla Open Source (compatible; MSIE 6.0 is a pile of shit; Fuck Microsoft)
I get in just fine.
The above is not worth reading.
Patient: Doctor, my browser won't work when I go to MSN.
Doctor: So, don't go there. That will be $100.00, please.
hey,
this pushes the monopoly issue further. All we have to do is keep the department of justice involved.
I'm using Mozilla 0.9.4 and I'm still getting the blocking page at 7:33 US Eastern time
Windows 3.1 used to check to see if you were running it on top of DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS, and would exit with a message "incompatible OS" or something like that. Of course, Windows 3.0 ran just fine on top of DR-DOS, as did everything else. Better, in fact, since DR-DOS supported memory management features of the 386 before MS-DOS.
Same asinine tactic. Same b.s. excuses about compatibility. Is anyone really surprised?
Wow thats friggin great ...
All other sections of msn.com render great!!!
What the hell is on the first page? Bill Gates stickin his hand up the goatese.cx guys butt ?
I love how in the CNet article how they say the experience is degraded by mozilla and such because "simply because they don't support the standards we support closely". IE makes up its own standards, and then declares them to be more important than the official w3c standards. It's getting worse all the time with them... Well, it was bad all along, but they are growing increasingly confident and brave and, unfortunately, successful in their conquests.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Make sure you have the psm installed.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Actually, most of the browsers announce themselves as Mozilla/4.0 .NET Passport Hailstorm ???
[fine print]
(compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT)
[/fine print]
So we have Microsoft breaking compatability with the browser that their browsers claim to be.
This is the bunch that is going to bring us
Methinks its time for this rat to desert a sinking ship.
I hate reading propaganda. I wish there was a plugin that would turn business-speak the same color as the background.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I use Proxomitron on my Windows machine to block advertising, java window.open() calls, etc. when surfing the web. It replaces the browser identity header with one that says "SpaceBison". MSN.com blocks this as well. I'd guess there's more going on than simply blocking Opera and Mozilla.
Once they have scarred away non-IE users, and used their 404-redirector to keep most users in the MSN universe, and once all of the "windows updates" get the .Net client libs and VMs downloaded to users, they will have all of the pieces in place to create a richer protocol (closed of course) and go for the fully interatvie experience.
And why not? They own the client, so they can use .net client code to create sites that employ windows media and other technologies to create experiences you simply can't get on regular web sites.
I am convinced that they are on the verge of creating a separate web.
Apathy -- The state of numbness of the mind. When you are apathic, you can think.
I'm not sure about Mozilla, but if you are running a squid proxy you can fake the user agent of everyone locally who is browsing the web through. For example add the following line to squid.conf:
fake_user_agent Uber-Browser 5.6 (Cray/XMP)
Then all hits made via that proxy will appear to be made with the above imaginary browser.
I don't use MSN or any MS product, just more trouble than they're worth, in my experience. If they don't want me to hit their site with Mozilla that's fine with me, I won't visit their site.
/., I would have to change, 'cause I can't live without a daily dose. But, then, it never would be /. would it?
Its not like they have anything I can't get on a hundred other sites.
I won't switch to NS4.7, its lame, and I certainly won't change my browser tag when its easier to just go to Yahoo.
Now, if this was
Who discovered this in the first place? I mean, really. The guy was using Opera or Mozilla hopefully, and why would an intelligent soul like that ever hit MSN.com?
/., Wired, WSJ and other big name sites, you start turning heads...
OH, I guess they were using NS 4.72 and didn't know any better perhaps?
More interestingly, do they have a really painful system for letting search robots in (giving all strange user-agent strings), or are they blocking them out as well?
Oooooh. I just had a wicked idea for the next time they try this. Get the ADA types on their backs. LAst I heard, ADA-compliant sites require Lynx accessibility for voice-navigatioh and text-to-speech description of the page.
This is exactly why we need a good union for IT and/or web designers, so we can actually have some weight to throw around when MS does crap like this. You don't let us into MSN? BANG. All the sites we design are now refusing IE connections. You get a few people running things like
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I bet they really read that and will realize that you are right and undo the changes! Good work!
As the Mozilla Tech Evangelism Qa Contact for the US region, it is my job to assist with the process of contacting sites that break in Mozilla and Netscape 6.x and helping them to fix any issues that they may have.
3 was filed about this problem. I filled out the MSN web feedback form asking why they were blocking Mozilla. I had already set my User-Agent string using some tools for Mozilla developers to match that of IE and found no problems whatsoever.
Before the new msn.com site went live and it was up at beta.msn.com, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10473
Shortly after posting a message on the feedback form, I got an email back (I had left my email address in the form) informing me that:
"This product is not actually a Microsoft product, so we may be unable to assist you with this. Since our Support Professionals are not trained to troubleshoot issues with Mozilla, we feel that your question would be best addressed by Mozilla's technical support."
I write back nicely informing them that I _am_ more or less Mozilla Technical Support and that I have no problems using Mozilla, etc...
Of course, a _different person_ writes me back stating that they are so sorry that they misunderstood me, but I used the wrong feedback form. They tell me I am supposted to use the feedback form I ALREADY USED!
After writing back telling them that I already used the form and asking if they could please direct this issue to the MSN webmaster group, I get another email, this time it was from the same person who emailed me telling me it was the wrong form. This email told me that they have no idea how the email got to them from that form, but that she forworded it to the appropreate department.
I sent an email a little while later thanking them for their help and asking to be kept informed of their progress. This gets me the same letter I got before, telling me to use the feedback form I used in the first place!
I then sent them an email asking them to please stop using the same form letters and to forward all of this to the msn group. I attached a complete thread of all the emails I have had back and forth with them.
I haven't heard back since. As of right now (late thursday afternoon, the time the article said it would be open), I still cannot access msn.com (mozilla build 2001101908) and get the "use ie" message.
Does Microsoft really get it?
If I go to msn.com, it goes to the "Attention: Web Browser Upgrade Required to View MSN.com." However, if I click on the "Advertise" link on that error page, it loads the msn site perfectly with advertising stuff. Funny how MS thinks my mozilla browser is not capable of rendering the msn home site but is capable of rendering the msn adertise site which is the msn site with advertise info in a frame.
Would it be possible to spread a worm that all it does is hack IE to make that change? Imagine what could be done if the user agent was set to something like "MONOPOLIES_SUCK_MORE_COCK_THAN_A_WHORE_HOUSE_WITH _A_TWO_FOR_ONE_SPECIAL"
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; <a href=http://www.mozilla.org>Mozilla it's not Internet Exploder!; X11; Linux; en-US)");
I know it's probably a nightmare in web based log analysis tools. But oh well.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
So, Microsoft says:
h ar set=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies."
BUT if you run the W3C validator [http://validator.w3.org/] against MSN.com, it fails:
--
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.msn.com&c
"Sorry, this document does not validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict."
--
Please explain this to me.
free ipod and free gmail!
A browser should not crash, no matter how messed up the content it receives. Period.
And a broswer should not execute a program automagically, no matter what type of file it's told it is, audio/x-wav or not. Period.
Talk about your buggy pieces of trash.
MSN is apparently whitelisting acceptable browsers, rather than blacklisting "bad" ones. lynx is a text-only browser; why bother to blacklist it? wget doesn't work either, and it's not a browser at all. I set my lynx user agent to "big titties" and it didn't like that; therefore they have a list of "approved" browsers.
Fun fact: Google can not crawl msn.com. I set my user agent to "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" and it was rejected. I'll be a lot of search engines are similarly shut out.
Not that I *ever* go to msn.com for anything. I guess if the courts have already decided they are a monopoly, they might as well act like one.
This message has been scanned for memes and dangerous content by MindScanner, and is believed to be unclean.
Hmmm, someone reads (and internalizes) The Onion. :-)
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
A browser should not crash, no matter how messed up the content it receives.
If you're gonna be that picky, NO program should. Browser, editor, server, media player, codecs, drivers, operating systems, etc. How long do you want to wait?
Granted, the Netscape 4.x series was rather buggy, you're exaggerating a bit though.
Isn't that like the phrase "A sheep in wolf's clothing"?
Stealth Humor: "speaker says something funny that goes over your head, as soon as he's out of range then it hits you".
All joking aside, I've found as a webmaster that using I.E. to check "handcoding" and standards compliance of *valid* HTML to be a mistake of the worst kind.
Why?
Simple, I.E (4.x and above, if memory serves) allows for HTML/Programming mistakes, like not closing tags at all, much less in the proper order.
Making programming mistakes is one thing, but to keep making mistakes and *never* correct them because your browser hides them. Oye.
On the flip side, I wonder if you could have Dreamweaver say it is MS Frontpage and make a webpage griping about MSN and Frontpage... you know, "disparaging remarks" not allowed in the EULA?
Did anyone notice what program "generated" the MSN homepage?
Curious.
Technology....Politics...Karma whoring...*this* is Slashdot!
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Please, I encourage you to submit a Web Accessibility Initiative report that details EVERY aspect of their page that sucks. Here is a sample.
Or, to strike back, lets start setting up sites to reject IE, tell them they need to upgrade to Mozilla or something. Imagine if /. did this! :)
As of 20:08 CST Opera 5.05 for Linux was still locked out.
The thing that really makes me wonder is the link to advertise on MSN at the bottom of the warning page!
That is spammer mentality. Annoying a group of people then taking the time to try and foist their wares on them.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
I hadn't even been aware of that module. Now that I am, and given Microsoft's behaviour, I do believe I'll install it ;). (Only perhaps I'll make it "Microsoft-Free Every Day.)
Microsoft may have plenty of share in the browser market, but look at what they've got in the server market. Over half of the web servers on the planet are running Apache. Places like yahoo, google, and Altavista use apache and *nix or *BSD.
Microsoft can't dominate the web when they don't have a lot of share in the server market.
D/\ Gooberguy
Microsoft's MSN is blocking access by the browser that Microsoft's Internet Explorer pretends to be, i.e. Mozilla/4.0
Also does the same thing. But they allow IE and NS. I use Mozilla and Konq, I configured Konq to lie about the browser type, and EVERYTHING worked 100% as far as I could see.
They claim that it is just that they havn't tested it, and threfore can't guarantee that it is correct. Great plan I thought, what about people who have to use lynx.
I don't think the analysts at Microsoft are stupid. I think that they knew there'd be an uproar about their browser-blocking, and that they'd have to change it, days or hours later.
;)
Each little inconvenience adds up...and we are creatures of convenience. Enough little stumbling blocks get in the way, and eventually, you say "screw it" and install Internet Explorer. How many folks do you think did that very thing when they ran across their little blocking message? And how many folks do you think were pushed that closer to the edge of doing it NEXT TIME Microsoft pulls this stunt with one of their services.
In addition to desktop dominance, this was one of the ways Microsoft won the broswer war VS Netscape. Every time a revision of the OS would come out, Netscape would seem to stop working...eventually, people say "screw it" and use the browser that comes with the thing.
Heck, this was exactly how I weaned my wife off of her Mac
I tried to load msn from Lynx and got the same error message!
so you should be able to set an ID just for MSN without skewing the rest of the worlds perception of which flavour browsers really are out there.
.. it took me about 5 seconds. msn.com (and only msn.com) see's me as:
UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Alias: Internet Explorer 5.01 on Windows 2000
.. but I'm actually running Konqueror in KDE 2.2.1 on Linux. What a waste of time MS
In related news today, MSN's site became unavailable to all users as it was hit with a flood of traffic from curious geeks just to see if their browser was listed as complient.
It rejects Konqueror, Opera, Star Office and
Mozilla on SuSE Linux 7.2
It works on Netscape 4.77 with no background
color
Let the geeks at the collective sweat over that one. Oh, and get UF to do it as well, like you guys did that long-ago April day....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Wasn't there something at CNET about MS unblocking the browsers by the end of thursday? I realize i'm probably just picking on a tiny detail here and that where Redmond is, there's still another 4 hours 'til the end of the day... but come on, how difficult can it be to unblock browser strings? That's what, one line of code? One variable in a line? Being Opera & Mozilla are so close to W3C standards in so many ways, I'm SURE it wouldn't take very long to fix the problem. After all, according to the article at CNET (or was it the yahoo one?), MS said their code is pure W3C standard. So how hard is it? Maybe all their code is done procedurally and they have to change the browser string block code in a thousand places. *L* ....but I seriously doubt MS would code with such idiocy.
This whole thing seriously pisses me off.
- Dev
www.msn.com.au only shows this and NOTHING else in mozilla 0.9.2 (yes i'm lazy)
You may also remember that MSN was to be set up an an internet that M$ owned, until M$ realised that even they didn't have the cash to build the infrastructure or even rent major portions of it.
Defaming other peoples products is an old advertising tactic, going out of your way to stop them working is a bit of a different story. Whether this is akin to a contraceptive company going out and punching small holes in the products of their competitors may well be a matter for the courts.
Not that I ever used it before, mind you...
But it's the principle that counts!
I have a proxy / ad-filter which allows me to edit the browser strings. Almost nothing works! The only one that works was copied from IE6. Others I have tried include Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and random letters. As of 11:30 PM EST, I was unable to access msn.com without using the IE browser string. Since when did they back down? Another thing too: block IE from accessing slashdot for a day. It will really screw up those microsoft censors looking for a lawsuit over some comment moderated to -1. Better yet, make up a fake page!
It's MSN...I'm pretty sure that's owned by Microsoft, right? So they want to develop and code for their browser. Big deal. You don't like MS, don't go to their websites, and don't get perturbed if they want you to use their stuff when you do.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
It seems that MS is also interested in where you come from.
...
The first time that I went to http://www.msn.com/, I found that the page source had something like this:
...img height="0" width="0" src="http://c.msn.com/c.gif?PS=10215&NA=1154&a mp;NC=10009
&PI=7317&DI=340&RF=http://slashdot.org " alt="" border="0"
However, I cannot reproduce it on any subsequence visit.
When I change the ID String of Konqueror to
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT 5.0"
which means
"Internet Explorer 4.01 on Windows 2000"
MSN.com quickly becomes available to Konqueror.
I wonder if IE 4.01 is ACTUALLY compliant with the W3C standards M$ claims are required....
... the upcoming moho (which is cool "gets it"), canada.com umm
What does MSN.com have: a compelling set of features such that I would want to change operating systems and browsers to view it?
I don't think Microsoft *software* is that good but some people swear by it and I'll grant them they have a 20 year history of marketing and mindshare so maybe there's something to it
Mr. Bill G. before you start shutting down access to your content **go and buy a few companies that know how to make it *** and then oh yeah let them actually do it. The "partnership with NBC doesn't count since you have dumbed them down to a level of insipid idiocy that is embarassing. Bill, Paul uhh you know **shite** about content - either go back to school or get out of the road.
MSN blocking access is kind of like a popular clothing company saying you can't come and drive our Edsels until you change your clothes or something
my point being...so what. Great ideas and technical prowess have been proven to lose to good marketing (in the short term at least). I hate this fact as much as anyone, but it's true.
has great links to free pr0n galleries. Why would anyone use MSN?
Leave it M$ to try the heavy handed approach first. "Let's just block all non-M$ products!" There are a lot of stupid ideas in the world. I am always amazed that at some product review meeting, someone brought up that idea, and his boss said, "YES! That's what we'll do!"
There's a better way.
Instead of detecting browsers and being blatent about it, just use some M$-only, proprietary, copyrighted, DMCA copy protected, magic HTML or XML on every page. Surprisingly, only M$ IE 6.whatever can render it. When someone clicks on the "This page doesn't look right" button, a dialog box pops up and explains that the viewer has forgotten to download the latest Microsoft software. And its free!
And since they've already been way too blatant and clumsy, the community will not even notice the next time. Almost anything will seem subtle now.
Joe Lemming will not know or care what's going on. He will click "OK" and his M$N pages will be better than ever. Thanks to Microsoft.
Incidentally, they said they were blocking "...browsers that we know don't support (W3C) standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer." Note the 'or' ... so they're not precluding blocking a fully standards compliant browser they don't like (e.g. one not using WindowsXP)?
Does the broken browser work if you change its user agent string to "seineeWerAsremmargorPrerolpxEtenretnI"?
Go to Settings->Configure Konqueror->User Agent
for msn.com select Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5;Windows NT5.0)
Now, I'm able to come in to msn.com.
P.S. I don't know why would anyone with konqueror on linux would want to go to msn.com anyways.
If you can't navigate the dog-awful Javascript mess, here is the place to go to complain: http://www.msn.com/contactus.ashx.
You'll need to spoof your user-agent string to do so.
And blood sprays out of my nose. Isn't this the same company that was forced to remove the Java compatiable logos from them Java dev suite boxes becuase they did follow the standards????????????
Gah!!! M$ truely does follow the expression, "A fool is born every minute."
Qantas.com does this.
Sites that do this should explain WHY.
Any customer with a pulse should not be turned away. Whatever happened to text only alternatives?
And the Australian IRS(Tax) office is about to do same with ms certificates.. grrr.
Yep, an airline, turning away needed customers.
Anyway, HTML can be hacked, so now when booking, a huge huge table join, above and beyond what they expect is launched. Once customers hand code 'specials' - it is a small step for then to code compedetor scans as well. In fact some airlines do- to block and cause record locking
And everyone is blind
I hope microsoft keeps doing this...it's going to be fun watching them go the way of big blue. Here's the halloween documents in case you haven't read them already. They are pretty scary.
90% seems extremely high.
/. readers.
The only people I know that use IE are people that are not very good with computers, or people that "broke down" and went with IE because so many pages insisted on having IE to render them correctly (by not adhering to HTML standards).
I don't like IE, and I don't use it unless I'm at school and some other browser isn't already on the computer.
People say Mozilla is slow. Perhaps, but my computer is "slower" than the computers at school and Mozilla loads nearly as fast as IE (after Mozilla has been cached, like IE is upon start up of Windows). Honestly, Mozilla actually seems to render pages faster than IE does. I've been to DSLreports.com and Mozilla gives me higher numbers than IE does.
Oh well... that's my rant. I don't like IE.
However, I realize the majority of people use it.
Though I doubt 90% do, especially 90% of
when you sign on from Windows, it can only be done through some form of IE, which is what their setup program installs without asking, I must add. So you don't really need a *new* download of IE, they just don't want you browsing their site without an IE browser (probably more privacy intrusive.)
I've been using the Mozilla 4.76 ID under Opera and noticed the upgrade early in July, I think. It was a nasty script that caused my Opera to crash by running out its memory because the messagebox would keep coming back if you said cancel.
It's sad, but MSN communities will not allow me to log in at all without IE and netscape. But netscape is dying.
"Wireless : LAN
Didn't MSN do this before?
Though I would not have notice except for this posting. Got to wonder what this is a smoke screen for. What's happening right now that would benefit from being ignored by the /. crowd?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Let's face it people IE is the best browser out there right now. If you have your head so far up your own arse that you can't see that then you shouldn't be going to MSN in the first place. I don't know one web developer that doesn't bitch about having to make changes to a kick ass layout just to satisfy 8% of all web users. Don't get me wrong, though I love Linux, there is just some things that I don't make sense---> Like browsing the web with Butscrape Navigator.
Do it. Vote with your feet and take your business else where. This includes other businesses that do it and is most time effective for you.
If you're feeling evangelistic, the soft way is to drop them an e-mail. The hard way is to find a competitor with a better site. Then call up the first business and start an order, but ask if it can be done on the web, talk then through your browsing session and point out that their competitor's site. Maybe it's even a site that the ADA needs to know about.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Last week i promote Malay Langpack for Mozilla at
msn.com.my 's computing Channel
But anyway, msn.com.my still allow My Mozilla to get in
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
I used to check hotmail with Netscape 4.76 until
I installed IE, a couple of months ago (so i could test how it rendered my website). Now when i try and go to hotmail with Netscape i get a Javascript message "The document contained no data. Try again later, or contact the server's adminstrator."
So i'm forced to use IE to check my email. anyone else suffer similar problems?
People who are advising changing your browser string, you are playing into MS's arms. You're making percieved IE browser market share rise...and other websites will respond, with lots of IE-only features and less effort to support other browsers.
Please don't do this, unless you are sending that version string *only* to the MSN site.
Thanks!
I've seen a lot of people here pointing out that this is easy to work around, by changing the browser's user-agent string (possible in most decent browsers and/or possible to do at a non browser level). This, however, is not how it should be done! I want to be identified as an Opera and Mozilla user (I use both those browsers about as much). I want my Opera & Mozilla user agent strings to end up in their logs, and I want various surveys to indicate that the market share I represent is a little bit in those browsers' favour, not IE's.
May we live long and die out
I tried to run MSN through W3 Validator, and it was validating the reject-page. Coincidentally, the reject-page is in broken xhtml.
Stop the brainwash
in the article, the microsoft guy claims:
s n.com
:-)))))))
"Visse said earlier Thursday that the message would be shown to people using "browsers that we know don't support (W3C) standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer." W3C refers to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies."
Now begins the funny stuff:
http://validator.w3.org/check/?uri=http%3A//www.m
yes: even the W3C validator is bumped out by their restrictions, and, even more funny, the bump out text is NOT w3c-compliant !!!!
I think this is the best joke of the year from Redmond ! Kudos to those guys ! they're more funny than David Letterman and Michael Moore together !!!!
Nice, I've got to download "IE for Windows".
Anybody know where I can download Windows for the UltraSparc processor.
Hearing this, I moved to Mozilla 0.9.5 - and I've been quite impressed with it, the only problem being me being accustomied to Alt-D as the shortcut to the location bar, instead of Ctrl-L.
And I also sent an e-mail to Microsoft to let them know that I've moved from MSIE to Mozilla.
Another great PR move from the giant!
so, where do i now get my news from?
any recommendations?
Could be worse. Could be raining.
The solution to this "problem" is to write a new virus especially for the IE (ok, that's the usual case, I know), which changes the ident string of this browser to something M$ blocks ... I would like to see the end user face while trying to access the M$N pages with this patched IE and geting the reply: Only displayable with the IE!
#!/usr/bin/perl -w .' '.$res->message; ;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use strict ;
my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012') ;
my $i=0 ;
for(;;)
{ my $url="http://www.msn.com" ;
my $req = new HTTP::Request 'GET' => $url ;
$req->header('Accept' => 'text/html');
my $res = $ua->request($req);
if ($res->is_success)
{ $i++ ;
print $i."\n" ;
#print $res->content."\n\n" ;
}
else
{ print 'Error: '.$res->code
}
}
I just checked with Mozilla on win2k, and they still block me. Now if only they included instructions on how to completely remove IE from this box it'd be heaven.
Honda2001.com won't work right in konqueror either. I had to completely abandon what I was doing there.
Just tried accessing msn.com with Konqueror 2.9 - it still states I need to "upgrade" to M$IE.
I wonder what the DOJ will say on this.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
If you do this by using a utility like utility like The Proxomiton, IE displays the same error message! See here for an example of this.
Furthermore, if you use the same utility on Opera 5 to alter the UA from 'Opera' to 'OpXra' MSN will actually display pretty much as expected. Admitadley, it doesn't display exactly the same as IE normally displays but it is very similar and completely usable.
Microsoft are clearly targetting specific browsers which I think is very wrong! What about people who can't use IE because of having old hardware (and hence use a less resource intensive browser), the 'wrong' OS or disabled users who rely on browsers like BLynx???
Surely these users should be allowed to eXPerience the 'joys' of MSN. If Microsoft truely believe that you can only really appreciate how good MSN is with IE, then have a disclaimer appear at the top of the page when a so called 'non-complient' browser accesses your website but don't stop people accessing altogether!!!
Contrary to the update linking to the 2nd CNET story, which claimed the block would be lifed by end of Thursday, MSN.com is still blocking non-IE browsers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
#!/usr/bin/perl -w .' '.$res->message; ;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use strict ;
my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012') ;
my $i=0 ;
for(;;)
{ my $url="http://www.msn.com" ;
my $req = new HTTP::Request 'GET' => $url ;
$req->header('Accept' => 'text/html');
my $res = $ua->request($req);
if ($res->is_success)
{ $i++ ;
print $i."\n" ;
#print $res->content."\n\n" ;
}
else
{ print 'Error: '.$res->code
}
}
MSN is giving a $200 "shopping spree" to anyone who signs an MSN 2 years x $21.95/month MSN account at Radio shack. it's not just for getting a PC anymore, it's ANYTHING at Radio Shack.
please people, don't get a passport, and if you have one now demand your information back and cancel it.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
It might be fun for anyone out there using Windows to change your Internet Explorer User Agent String to include "netscape Opera" and then try to go to MSN. When it tells you to get a "more standards compliant browser" send an email with a screen shot of IE being blocked by msn.com to their tech support. Kinda petty, but amusing nonetheless.
If M$'s reason for keeping out other browsers is that they don't follow the W3C standards, then what is the excuse for this? [validator.w3.org]
This is from the CNET article on MSN blocking access to their web site:
...Microsoft admitted that its technology was watching for Opera strings--but
only because the company wanted to encourage people to use standard-compliant browsers....
It was my understanding that Opera was by definition W3C compliant. In fact, I was using it as a reference browser for a web site I'm developing for my neighborhood civic association.
...Have I been mis-informed about Opera or is Microsoft lying?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I just checked MSN.com here on my mac, and I still can't get in with either Mozilla 0.9.4 or 0.9.5 (I downloaded the update specifically to check). However I can get in fine with Netscape 4.78 (it doesn't crash, either).
Now, I also checked with iCab Pre2.5.3 and it was letting me in at first... but I noticed i had told it to say it was IE 5 for mac. I switched its user-agent string to "iCab/2.5.3 (Macintosh; I; PPC)" and got blocked. Same if I use "Lynx/2.8 (compatible; iCab 2.5.3; Macintosh; I; PPC)".
However, the following user-agent allowed me to get in: "Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; iCab 2.5.3; Macintosh; I; PPC)".
So it seems they're not just blocking Mozilla and Opera like some thought, but are broadly blocking non-IE and non-Netscape browsers.
Yeah, I am really depressed that I can't access MSN.? Unfortunately, I use hotmail and I have consistently had problems accessing it with Mozilla. I will be leaving hotmail soon.
I am 100% MS free at home (Linux, Mozilla, KDE, KOffice etc) and proud of it. Be happy to be blocked, who wants to go to MSN anyway. Consider it a compliment and come to slashdot instead.
Besides, what do you expect from a monopolist who insists on retaining the "...freedom to intimidate..uhh sorry...innovate..."
There's a huge difference -- Netscape 4.x is a hacked up non-compliant mess that has been on web developers hit list for years.
On the other hand, Mozilla is far more standards compliant than MSIE. Microsoft is inventing an argument to support their anti-competitive actions.
One simple rule for its versus it's
just tried to get there with mozilla and ns 4.7 and can't
Funny, the W3C doesn't seem to think so...
When I tried to access MSN today using Opera 5.11 and Mozilla 0.95 I was blocked -- though I noticed that the Opera home page ( http://www.opera.com ) had already announced victory, saying that Microsoft had unblocked their site. When I told this to the folks at Opera, they pointed me to a CNET article indicating that Microsoft had promised to open their site sometime today (Thursday). Um, how long does it take to remove whatever nasty bit of code they were using to block Opera and Mozilla users? One final point: isn't it absolutely idiotic of Microsoft to block web browsers that are widely used by the computer-literate, and web designers in particular. (Who else uses Mozilla?) It's as if they were asking for a fight.
Want a better browser? Check out http://www.labourstart.org/opera.shtml
Workers of the world, unite! http://www.labourstart.org
I just saw it in the FAQ once when looking. Eventually there'll be a GUI for configuring that.
In fact it looks fine! only 1 little Amazon add and no pop-overs.
Mozilla is still blocked from Amazon.com, but I can lynx it no problem. Hence they are finally agreeing that lynx gives an awesome user experience.
the best "other excuse as to why we all need IE" is mainly the fact that IE is a far superior browser. sorry, think what you will but look at the facts. netscape is laughably bloated and writes half of their own standards (while MS at least CONFORMS to standards BEFORE writing their own), mozilla is a joke, konqueror the same, opera ditto. there isnt a single browser out there that is half as polished as IE.
and the FINAL STRAW: IE CAN RENDER THE BACKGROUND OF EMPTY TABLE CELLS
We've just discovered a related action in Powerpoint XP: when converting slides to web pages, you need to explicitly select "save for older browsers" to get pages that work with anything other than IE 5.5+. Problem is, the "old fashioned" pages don't display correctly in anything other than old IE.
MS KB article Q285509 suggests "workarounds" of only supporting newer browsers (?) or not using advanced features (like text or images, apparently).
Well, I just kicked the last Microsoft program off my computer. Internet Explorer 5 for Mac does NOT render msn.com correctly! Mozilla, with a change of user-agent, well, it does a fine job...and quicker too.
User Agent String: ;Photon)
Mozilla/3.04 (compatible;QNX Voyager 2.03B
Having a look to see where Internet Explorer is for QNX - quelle surprise, nothing returned from the search engine.
Its like crying foul if Channel 3 starts requiring HDTV and stop supporting old-style broadcasting.
Even free content (not ad-supported, not grant supported) has the right to discriminate on the basis of browser. Only content supported with tax monies should be subject to "lowest common denominator, HTML V3, any browser" requirements. (Yeah, I know V3 is old, so what!).
How is this any worse than a site that requires me to use QuickTime to view something? I repeat, quitcherbitchin.
I've run into the problem before where IE is broken and I tried going to the Windows Update site using Netscape. It totally didn't work.
So did M$ just blindly block these browsers and not think about the possibility of IE being broken? I don't think so. I think the short answer is that if you can't get to an M$ site due to an M$ issue, then you need to call M$ Tech Support for $25/hr.
This is the way things went when I worked for MSN Tech Support many a year ago.
Think about all the solutions being posted here...
Everyone says just change your browser to make it *look* like i.e. So now all of a sudden everyone using browsers on various platforms now all say they are i.e. People will forget to change it back, if ever.
Now all of a sudden people measuring who is hitting their websites have data showing MORE IE users than are really out there and have even MORE of a reason to ignore the other platforms and browsers.
Think about it... If I really wanted to block another browser, I would have to download some active content (activex, script, java, etc) to figure out exactly what platform/browser you are on to block you. The fact that they are making it this easy to circumvent their *protection* is interesting...
MS didn't back off. Yesterday's builds of Mozilla as well as this morning's (2001102603) are still getting blocked if you don't spoof the UA string.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
I'm just glad that .NET is so scalable....
.NET Framework Version:1.0.3215.11; ASP.NET Version:1.0.3215.11
----
Server Error in '/' Application.
Server Too Busy
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: Server Too Busy
Source Error:
Stack Trace:
Version Information:Microsoft
This is just plain stupid. I've used Mozilla for months, even when they adjusted hotmail it displays just fine in both Konquerer and Mozilla.
Now they change msn to launch xp, but the same silly little tabs and colour scheme used in hotmail just don't quite line up in this new msn. What gives? Can't the hotmail team teach the msn team on cross-browser compatibility?
-- not that it really matters to me, I don't use msn anyway ---
"BSD is about people pissing each other.." (Moid Vallat)
Somewhat interresting reading...
[opera.com]
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
I've been using iCab on OS X and I love it. But you have to customize!
In the Preferences, under the Network category, choose Identity/Proxies. here you'll find a bunch of radio buttons with ways iCab can change the User-Agent variable.
If you select "iCab", MSN will block you. If you select "MSIE 5.0", MSN will let you through.
End of story. Screw MSN, who wants their candy-coated, suitable-for-MTV-viewers content anyway?
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
My first thought was to see what the HTML Validator at HTML Validation Service had to say about their www.msn.com page. MSN seems to be blocking it, 'cause it gets the "browser upgrade" page too.
... And even that simple page fails the validation.
I would guess that the server side code is checking the user agent field very early in the page generation process, so that later on their html generation code doesn't need to do that check.
I used IE to save the complete page and uploaded the html file to the W3C validator. This page fails on the first line - the DOCTYPE! The document claims HTML 4.0, while the validator expects HTML 4.01. So much for using the latest HTML standards
Opera and Mozilla are blocked at noon EST.
I dont like Mozilla cos the fonts look `wrong` - also, a lot of controls (like radio buttons which are circular, but with ugly boxes around them). Yuck.
Well, duh.
Browser, editor, server, media player, codecs, drivers, operating systems, etc. How long do you want to wait?
I don't think crash-free software is too much to ask for; it's not that hard to do, if you know what you're doing. (of course, all the APIs and the OS you are using has to be bug-free as well... unfortunately that is not generally the case. But that's no excuse for allowing bugs in your own code!)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
may or may not be redundant, but I downloaded the site ran it in opera and IE, look exactly the same except Opera 5.12 had a bigger margin on the left side.
Browser blocking is bad! But there is something that makes me wonder. In adware version of opera I have found about 3 websites that advertise in the browser, and then kick opera out. Good thing opera has a feature to PRETEND its another browser!
This just in:
Slashdot automatically mods higher any comments posted from mozilla or opera.
You heard it here first.
Konqueror: nope (not with default user agent, anyhow, but
Konqueror works pretty well with modified userAgent. I tested with MS IE 5.0/Win96 UA. Screenshot is here
You may want also to try version with increased fonts.
You can also find my postings concerning Subject on kde-devel and www-style mailing lists.
KDE. KDE Themes. KDE News. Visit http://kde2.newmail.ru
Maybe making one that just gives them an informative message with links to information on the problem wouldn't be such a bad idea. Let them in after displaying the page and only display it to them once.
iCab and Lynx are still blocked unless you send a fake browser identity
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Has anyone tried running MSN's 'XHTML Compliant' pages through W3C's validation service? Every document I've tried has reported either plenty of random errors throughout, or fatal errors that prevent the page from being viewed. Hmm... And *Mozilla* doesn't adhere to standards?
Also, http://www.msn.com in the validator gets the same 'Browser Upgrade Required' page as a non-IE client does. It found errors on that page, too. =P
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
http://advantage.msn.com/home/home.asp
For me the right frame does not properly render, and there is some java source code about browser matching in there. opera seems to be screwing up the rendering, so I can't copy thre text...
1>Cannot display PNG graphics properly in its "standard compliant" browser.
2>violates Kerberos standard
3>cannot understand that Java is not theirs.
Linux: we believe in fostering the information future, not raping it.
Yes, let's look at the definition of "professional", shall we?
According to Merriam-Webster, the first meaning of "professional" is this:
1 a : of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession b : engaged in one of the learned professions c (1) : characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession (2) : exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace
Note the emphases, smartass.
Notably, if you access msn.com with Mozilla, you get a HTML 4.0 document, but with IE, you get an XHTML document..... I haven't fully checked the IE version, but I'd put good money on there being properitary extensions to XHTML in there somewhere.
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
According to dictionary.com - definition 3: performed by persons receving pay.
And we're not in the workplace.
Smartass
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
It wouldn't have been possible to 'upgrade' them to some version of MS IE since their tools are way to customized to their impairments.
Just when I think MS is 100% evil, there is a 1% pop-up of good.
-- Multics
I have been revolting for years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion