[Gllug] txuenergi.co.uk website refusing Mozilla

[Tethys]

Richard Cohen writes:

>Unfortunately the browser you are currently using does not work with
>our web site.
>
>If you would like to be able to view this site, we would suggest that
>you install one of the browsers listed below...

Sigh. I've just lost the argument with people at work that browser
detection scripts are evil, and our site will be having them soon :-(

The problem is that it's so hard to do it right. Rather than being
able to query the browser's capabilities, the site has to rely on
a static lookup table based on the User-Agent to determine if the
browser will work OK.

It looks like TXU is a prime example. They're probably checking for
the string "Netscape", when ideally they should be able to check for
something like:

	has_capability(css2_float) && has_capability(dom_GetElementByName)

As a short term workaround, they could be looking for "Gecko" rather
than "Netscape", but that's no substitute for doing it properly. To
make things worse, it looks like they're doing it directly in ASP on
the server rather than in JavaScript on the browser -- which means
you can't even glean from the source where you *should* be going if
the browser detection wasn't stopping you...

Tet

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