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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
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?
find out what is reported by IE/NS and have Konq send that out as the ID.
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...
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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;
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."
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
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
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.
-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.
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.
Why in God's name are you going to Windows update in Mozilla, on linux nonetheless??? Don't you realize that:
Windows update runs totally on ActiveX controls, which don't work in anything but IE, and
It downloads and installs everyhing on the fly, which makes it useless in Linux??
Someone mod the parent down, he's either a total idiot or a helpless troll
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 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
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.
You need to use AOL's browser to use AOL!
Best Slashdot Co
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.
Well I like to take a quick gander at all the news headline sites. including msn.com just to see if they are reporting and odd stories that I havn't seen elsewhere. Its rare for msn.com to report anything that msnbc.com isn't. But it happends.
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?
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
Here'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
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?
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.
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...
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.
Everyone breate deeply, and point their Windows-based Netscape browser to www.msn.com. No errors whatsoever for me. Try it before you panic.
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.
Bullshit. It is _easier_ to code a site that will display properly in all browsers than to write a browser-specific site. So-called "web developers" who use allegedly WYSIWYG site-building tools and wouldn't know a line of standard HTML if it bit them in the ass may disagree, but I'm no more worried about their opinion when I'm building a Web site than I am about the opinion of the Flat Earth Society when I'm reading a map. I make my living writing Web pages that _work_.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
There's a link to an "MS Exclusive concert", wherin Sting kicks off the WindowsXP launch. Maybe that's what they're trying to hide? Not that I give a damn about the Ex-Police guy who's sold his soul (the sale of which will have to be confirmed with the devil's auditing department within one month of said sale toprevent unauthorized copying of said soul by "hackers" and re-confirmed once a year for the subsequent duration of said sale)...
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
Uh oh, now you're circumventing an access control mechanism, it's off to the big house with you!
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...
Hotmail and MSDN will soon follow.
I have long been unable to login to Hotmail (after trying to login I never get a page returned) on various Linux boxes running NS 4.7, whereas I can login fine from my NT box right beside it. I have always been working under the tacit assumption that MS was either intentionally not replying to an 'unpreferred' browser, or was generating HTML that would somehow trip up NS on my platform.
Anyone else have problems accessing Hotmail with Netscape on Linux
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.
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
Bad analogy. A better one would be "Imagine you tried to drive your motorcycle underwater and it didn't work!" Er, yeah, anyone who has brains doesn't try that, and if they do, there hopeless.
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.
Well, then you'll have to get it from the plain old "Go to microsoft.com and click on Download". Yeah, I know its a HUGE hassle, those couple of mouse clicks instead of having a wizard do it all for you....
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.
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
It won't let you instal Windows patches on a Linux box. Duh.
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.
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); }
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
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.
it's a WEBPAGE, it should work with any browser.
Free Mac Mini
I haven't tried changing it, but maybe this key controls the string:
e ntVersion\Internet Settings
Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr
Value: User Agent
Perhaps somebody should write an Outlook virus that changes the UserAgent string of IE so that it claims to be something else! That would be pretty funny. There are some files in my Winnt directory tree that contain part of this string, so I don't know if it's a simple registry hack, or a binary patch. I can't be bothered to try it right now.
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?
Works fine with Netscape Communicator 4.77. I'm using WebWasher, so the host only sees the proxy.
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 is close, but not exact. The www.msn.com page has "fuzzy" fonts, almost unreadable with IE 5.5 SP2 on Win2000. The msn.com.br page is quite legible.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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 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
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
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 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
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.
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!
In a sane world, lying to people about your competitors' products over the internet would be called "wire fraud" and be prosecuted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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.
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.
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.
This isn't at all comparable to AOL with its Instant Messaging client. The WWW started as a standardized and open environment, which Microsoft is now trying to claim as its own. AOL, on the other hand, has always been a proprietary platform. Which is also somewhat necessary seeing as they're paying for the servers.
Also, AOL has always been a choice. I said "no" to that choice some time ago. On the other hand, Microsoft is doing everything they can to use their monopoly to force the average user to cough up money, and also to prevent the average user from making a decision to go to another platform. How long do you think it'll be before Microsoft starts using veto power over programs made for XP, to prevent anyone from competing on their operating system? Then how long before they have IE check SERVERS so that you can only view content running on Microsoft servers?
This is just the first step here...
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
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.
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.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
Were these pages run by Netscape, Inc?
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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
I bet they are blocking all the spiders too. Never come to msn after a "I feel lucky".. Good move.
Is it possible to write a proxy that reports as MSIE, but converts incoming pages for compatibility for the browsers that connects to it?
Hmm...gonna have to fire up the Mac when I get home to see what it does now...
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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*/
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 guess I won't be reading anything on MSN anymore.
I would guess that, in addition to its worm-propagating capabilities, IIS has something that serves the same function as the example above.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
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."
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.
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....
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
They seem to accept anything matching
Mozilla.*\(compatible; MSIE [4-6]\.\d+.*.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Millions of millions of Windows PCs using Internet Explorer, I don't think Microsoft is scared in the slightest about anything anyone wants to throw at their browser. Netscape was cool way back when but then they broke it and ignored oppertunities. IE picked up the slack and mopped the floor with Netscape in the minds of the people that count, the users. Shut up.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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
Why pick Nike instead of Monsanto or Dow or Lockheed Martin? Thousands of clothing companies do what Nike does.
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.
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
Yeah, right. By the way, what is that MSN thing?
MSN stands for Microsoft Network.
There's no need of suspicious theories about MS paying them for it.
Of course not. MSN is Microsoft.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
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))"
You call yourself a professional. As a professional, it is your responsibility to meet the standards recognised within the industry. The standards which define the World Wide Web are created by w3c.
If, instead of meeting those standards, you choose to do only what the customer wants, you cease to be professional. Please refrain from using the word in your title.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I'm using Mozilla 0.9.4 and I'm still getting the blocking page at 7:33 US Eastern time
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.
[shrug] I use CSS, JavaScript, etc. ... and amazingly, my pages still look fine in Netscape 4+, IE 4+, Mozilla, and Opera. I write the code using Mozilla to check my work, then test the pages in Netscape, IE, and Opera. Maybe 1% of the time I find a small, easily fixed bug in the way the pages display in one of those browsers (usually IE, no surprise.) I fix the bug and voila: a working page.
"Sorry, dude, but youhave no clue what you're talking about."
Go fuck yourself.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Okay, as an addendum: I shouldn't have said "all browsers," I should have said, "all modern browsers."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
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"
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.
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
Not that I ever used it before, mind you...
But it's the principle that counts!
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
Didn't MSN do this before?
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
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
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
and what the f..k is this ??? How can we stay here bitching about how site www.something.com is not w3c compliant whe /. itself isn't too ???
I'm a /. and opensource supporter, but sometimes it's neccessary for me or someone else to play devil's advocate.
What ? Me, worry ?
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
It's more like Channel 3 saying they require HDTV and then only one brand (the HDTV brand) working on it.
Clearly you do not understand what the purpose of HTML or the Web is.
How is this any worse than a site that requires me to use QuickTime to view something?
It's worse because at least the QT site isn't lying about what you need and why.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
There is no such thing as a browser that is W3C compliant "by definition"; all fall short in some area. Opera is one of the best and certainly has led IE for years in its W3C compliance.
What MS is trying to do here is establish IE as HTML-compliant by definition.
BTW, this is an HTML issue rather than HTTP.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Opera and Mozilla are blocked at noon EST.
That is true; the issue here is that they are claiming that they are NOT using a proprietary system. This is false advertising.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
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