MSN Blocks Mozilla, Other Browsers [updated] 1295
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."
Confirmed, and this is great news. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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..
Not to sound like a dick.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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
No no no! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Matter of Economics (Score:1, Insightful)
It costs a lot of money to build a website. Even more, if you have to build the website to render correctly in all browsers.
Now that Internet Explorer has emerged as the browser of use for most consumers, it makes since for a company to build their webpages to only support Internet Explorer. If another browser can comprimise the quality of the site, it also makes since to inform the user to upgrade to the proper browser rather than risk having your site displayed incorrectly.
I think you will begin to see more and more web owners follow this trend. If a site caters to another class of users that demographically prefer free browsers than they will not follow this lead. However, most business's will go with the dominant browser, particulary if that browser involved an investment from the consumer. A business wants to attract people willing to spend money.
Ok everyone: tell the DoJ! (Score:2, Insightful)
If the DoJ is aware of even half of what goes on, they'll be more capable of fighting a court battle.
Re:Okay.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Workaround.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gerv
Re:Workaround.... (Score:3, Insightful)
On my homepage I'm experimenting with a rather unique CSS positioning layout on the front page. Mozilla does a great job with it, IE does a poor (but readable) job with it, and NS 4 royally screws it up. To overcome this, I included some javascript that checks the user agent string and comments out the link to the stylesheet if it finds NS4.
Basically if you are running NS4 with a false user agent string, you will see a bunch of garbage when you visit my web site.
THE REASON THIS IS SIGNIFIGANT... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Workaround.... (Score:2, Insightful)
...then I changed it to report a various version of Netscape for Mac or Windows and it appears they are only blocking Netscape 6.1 on the PC.
This should turn out to be one interesting fight... who brought the popcorn?
Something tells me... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Client identifiers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
IE is losing the browser wars... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Client identifiers (Score:3, Insightful)
Your comparsion is flawed. Protocols identifiers describe publicly-known capabilities. These capabilities are standarized in the protocol. On the otherhand, what Microsoft is doing is asking Mozilla what it can do, but simply saying "Your badge says Mozilla; go away." Mozilla can handle MSN with ease. It is not a protocol or capability issue that Microsoft is blocking because of.
The W3 standards are not designed so that each user gets the exact same experience. They are designed so that an agent can be customized for a user's experience. It should not the servers' problem that there are buggy clients. As you state, there will be more of them, and catering to them is asking for more broken software.
Almost, but not quite... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [mozilla.org], 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 [w3.org], 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.
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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 [microsoft.com]
- Internet Explorer for Macintosh [microsoft.com]
- MSN Explorer for Windows [msn.com]
©2001 Microsoft Corporation.ÂÂAll rights reserved.Terms of Use [slashdot.org]Advertise [slashdot.org]TRUSTe Approved Privacy Statement [slashdot.org]GetNetWise [slashdot.org]---
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.