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MSN Blocks Mozilla, Other Browsers [updated]

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the darn dept.

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."

5 of 1,295 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not for me by savaget · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Netscape® Communicator 4.73 works fine.

  2. Re:Workaround.... by michaelmclendon · · Score: 0, Redundant
    I couldn't get through using Mozilla 0.9.1 on linux, so I don't think they are just blocking Win32 and MacOS.

    I could view msn.com using Netscape 4.77 on linux.

  3. Hack the User Agent header? by CraigoFL · · Score: 3, Redundant
    The Yahoo article has a quote from the CEO of Opera (who's browser is also locked out of MSN):
    "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."
    So, it sounds like M$ is checking the USER-AGENT HTTP header for certain strings, and displaying the "Upgrade to IE" page if yours doesn't match.

    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.

  4. Try changing your browser's identity by Sir+Holo · · Score: 0, Redundant

    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.

  5. MSN.com is not XHTML 1.0 compliant by UnrefinedLayman · · Score: 0, Redundant

    So maybe they should take it offline to ensure compatability...

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .msn.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doc type=Inline