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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."
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...
"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."
From the story it appears to check the browser type. Apparently changing the browser type string that Opera sends by one letter gets around the problem. It also explains why Netscape 6.1 can get in when Mozilla can't.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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}}
Well they probably hardly know or care about Konqueror. From what I've read the page specifically blocks Opera and Mozilla. If you change Opera to report it as Ophra for example. It will let it go through. So its not a block everthing but IE scheme. Its a lets not let Opera or mozilla in scheme, which I think is worse as its specifically discriminating. And not by quality either as Opera and Mozilla are the 2 non IE browser that most likly will render msn.com best.
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
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.
You need to use AOL's browser to use AOL!
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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.
They're blocking specific ones.
:)
eg: Opera includes the ability to spoof certain other ones, but still tacks "Opera 5.xx" somewhere in the UA. So if you simply search it for "Opera", you can block it. If they change the string to Opero for example, it will work again.
The interesting thing is that I'm not sure what would happen if you made a copy of IE using the IEAK that contained a custom UA string that had the word "Opera 5" in it. I wonder if it'd get blocked too.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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
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.
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.