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."

Re:How are they blocking ?

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. :)

Re:Not for me

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.

Workaround....

Apparently MS is only blocking OS's that have IE available (Win32 / MacOS)...there is hope: A story on mozilla.org [mozilla.org] shows how to change what your browser reports as its UserAgent (Customizing Mozilla [mozilla.org]). 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...

No no no!

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.

Re:Workaround....

This isn't true - they are blocking Mozilla and Opera on Linux, but allowing 4.x. This makes their "it's about web standards" story rubbish.

Gerv

Re:Workaround....

Actually, what makes their story rubbish is that (1) it doesn't accept the W3C HTTP Validator and (2) the splash page doesn't even *pass* the validator.

Not just "incompatible browsers"

This doesn't seem to be one of those issues where MS will claim that non-IE browsers can't view MSN because of technical incompatibilities. According to the Yahoo article, Opera is claiming that MSN is actively blocking the browser depending on what name it reports to the server. Non-IE browsers that MS hasn't chosen to block are working fine, at least according to Opera.

"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."

Confirmed, and this is great news.

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.

It's just to fool statistics

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..