Pale Moon is an unsupported browser at spectrum.net

[mozilianulb]

**Steps to reproduce:**
1. Navigate to: https://www.spectrum.net/login.
2. Observe the login page.

**Expected behavior:**
The login page is displayed with no issues encountered.

**Actual behavior:**
A warning message banner regarding the browser's compatibility with the page is displayed.

**Tested with:**

Browser / Version: Pale Moon Version:29.4.6/ Firefox Nightly 101.0a1 (2022-04-27) (64-bit) / Chrome Version Version 101.0.4951.41 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Operating System: Windows 10 PRO x64

**Notes:**
1. Works as expected using Firefox and Chrome.
2. Screenshot attached:

[moonbat]

So ask them to support it.

[ron_1]

My question is, did you log in with Pale Moon anyway and did it work? If something didn't work, what didn't?

I have a different website give me a similar banner, yet everything works for me in that website.

[van p]

I have a Spectrum account. I get the message, but I can log in and do whatever I need to do. This could change in the future, of course, but for now it works There's similar behavior with other sites.

[Kand_in_Sky]

if there are no other issues ignore it or set the useragent for FireFox (or something else) and the message will be gone.


about:config
general.useragent.override.spectrum.net;Mozilla/5.0 (%OS_SLICE% rv:99.9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/99.9

[BenFenner]

I can shed some light on this.
I was the original person who reported this problem to www.webcompat.com here: https://webcompat.com/issues/103137
Also here on GitHub: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/103137
The PM forum user mozilianulb is from that team.

At first I thought it would be a useful web site that could help the entire web community with their seemingly honorable goal of prioritizing compatibility across browsers, and helping web sites obtain this, or nudging them in the right direction. One of their goals seems to be that these "wrong browser" banners don't ever show up for anyone, so I made this submission to them

However, after dealing with them over the last couple weeks it has become clear it is just a Mozilla project, designed to benefit Firefox only, and aimed at their mobile browser in particular.

There is more I could say on the situation, and sources if you'd like, but that's the jist of it. It's pretty obnoxious they came to the forum here to report a problem that is not a Pale Moon issue, but is instead a Spectrum web site issue. Not only that, they didn't link back to the original report. They are not behaving as I'd hoped.

So ask them to support it.

This is exactly what I expected them to do. It is certainly part of their MO. I have no clue why they did not.

[moonbat]

This is exactly what I expected them to do. It is certainly part of their MO. I have no clue why they did not.

Most web devs don't bother testing beyond Chrome, and on top of that will keep adopting the latest draft features that aren't part of the spec. Pale Moon only implements features that have been approved into the spec - so it is actually them that are not standards compliant. Add to that broken browser detection by user agent sniffing.

[Pallid Planetoid]

I have a Spectrum account. I get the message, but I can log in and do whatever I need to do. This could change in the future, of course, but for now it works There's similar behavior with other sites.

Most sites will actually work in spite of whenever the "Pale Moon is not compatible" warning messages get displayed.

[Moonchild]

will keep adopting the latest draft features that aren't part of the spec. Pale Moon only implements features that have been approved into the spec

And even that can't be relied on any more, because Google has a very heavy hand in spec writing. They write most new specs, they influence workgroups, they get the required "second vote" from Mozilla to have weird implementation quirks adopted into specs, and as a result specs become descriptive of Blink rather than providing specifications of features that web developers asked for.
Don't believe me? Pull up any recent spec on W3C and check the editors section in the header of the docs. I'll be surprised if you can find any that don't have a Google person listed.

Most sites will actually work in spite of whenever the "Pale Moon is not compatible" warning messages get displayed.

Ah but for the on-going narrative that nothing except Chromium is compatible with the modern web, throwing these kinds of warnings in people's faces is an effective measure.

The login page is displayed with no issues encountered.

Aside from an arbitrary warning, the login page is displayed and works, so... "works as expected"
Not informing us in what capacity you came to this forum is a bit of a faux pas, with another using this as some kind of entry to claim the browser is at fault for an arbitrary UA check while your background should have given you all indications this isn't a functional issue and the correct steps would be to use advocacy for webcompat. But I guess the advocacy stops at the point where it will no longer benefit Firefox/Mozilla?
I mean, this isn't much better than what Google is doing, just a slightly different context. Instead of spec writing, the webcompat database seems to have been created and maintained by an organisation with conflict of interest and isn't independent, while pretending to be.

I'm honestly disappointed.

[mozilianulb]

It seems that there has been a misunderstanding here.User-agent sniffing is classed as a compatibility issue, and in this cases, the page should be contacted by a representative of the browser. Pale Moon is not in their list in the pseudo-code. If no members from a browser vendor are available to contact and diagnose the issue in our project, we forward the issue to a place where the said browser investigates issues (web compatibility). At the moment very few vendors are part of the project, but our aim is to involve more people. One member of our community tries to reproduce the issue. When they can reproduce it, it moves to diagnosis. They might have an issue reproducing and will come back with questions.After moving the issue to diagnosis, one member of our community digs into the code to figure out what’s causing the compatibility issue and or files bugs with browser vendors. But various team members are representing a browser vendor from the vast list of browser vendors, so they can not investigate/diagnose/contact a page for another browser vendor (if we have no team members representing the browser on board), if that makes sense. As a community, we aim to signal and fix compatibility issues, but this is based on collaboration with most browser vendors. We are more than happy to get everyone on board.

[Moonchild]

So, are you at all interested in adding Pale Moon to your webcompat tests? Because as far as we've been able to see it is purely Mozilla/Fennec/Fenix focused. Just "passing the buck" to us to have us ultimately in the same situation where we have to contact websites after a report on our forum and them having no reference material short of installing Pale moon themselves being expected to do anything is a fool's errand. This onboarding is not something we can do, as it will be a compatibility/testing effort that will have to be adopted into your framework.
If there's anything specific you need me to do, let me know, but as far as I can see the list being short is entirely because of the limited focus of webcompat as a site.

I mean...

**Actual behavior:**
A warning message banner regarding the browser's compatibility with the page is displayed.

What can we do about such a report? We can't right change the website in question. At most we can work around the issue (as has been suggested) by way of a site-specific user-agent override (SSUAO) to fool the check that doesn't detect Pale Moon as "a thing" to begin with. It doesn't solve anything if there's no advocacy, as I already explained.

[mozilianulb]

That is correct. As advocacy is needed, anyone representing PaleMoon can do this (volunteer, paid workers, etc). Some people are participating on a volunteer basis (which again is super appreciated where available)
And some people are paid by browser companies. We can't handle the bugs for everyone all the time. It takes time and effort. Thus some browsers are represented in our project, and some are not (volunteers, paid, it all depends on the vendor of the browser- if and how they see fit). We do not have general representatives that might represent/advocate for the mass of browsers that are currently existing on the web, therefore we signaled the issue here (because it was reproducible- therefore needed diagnosis and a point of contact from our project's POV). I am part of a small team (of 2) that triages and investigates all reported issues, but since we have no one to diagnose the reproducible issue on PaleMoon and take action (if and how they see fit ) - giving us also a glimpse on how similar issues related to the page might be concluded from our projects POV).

Again, we signal the issue, but we can not take action against the issue on behalf of PaleMoon. Each browser has its own representative in our project (if available). Even if the issue is reproducible on other browsers that are not listed in the pseudo-code, since the report came from a PaleMoon user, we addressed the reported browser. The action to be taken against the issue is decided by the representative of the browser, and if in some way I gave the impression that we are interfering with that, that was not the intended purpose.

[leothetechguy]

I've always thought the web compatibility project is about supporting Projects that don't have the resources to ask websites themselves. If its not, whats the point then?

Having this blocklist of supported browsers is the wrong approach anyway and anybody advocating for web compatibility should recognize that.

So its not just about Palemoon, it about anything but firefox, chrome, edge, opera etc...

[Pause]

I've always thought the web compatibility project is about supporting Projects that don't have the resources to ask websites themselves. If its not, whats the point then?

Having this blocklist of supported browsers is the wrong approach anyway and anybody advocating for web compatibility should recognize that.

So its not just about Palemoon, it about anything but firefox, chrome, edge, opera etc...

This was exactly my thinking.

Most sites aren't going to listen to smaller projects and are just going to brush reports off as them only supporting the mainstream browsers.

If the makers of the biggest mainstream browsers (such as Mozilla or Google) were to contact them advocating for smaller projects by being browser-agnostic, then sites would probably be more willing to listen.

While some site owners/maintainers are willing to listen to smaller projects, it tends to be an exception rather than the rule.

I can't see that happening though, because of the web standards seemingly being dictated by Chrome implementing things first and expecting everyone else to follow by proposing it as a standard afterward (which is especially hard on smaller projects, unless they're just another Chromium-based rebadge), even worse if there were already existing ways to achieve the same result.

Of course, in Google's case they'd also need to show they meant it by making their own sites browser-agnostic too.

[vannilla]

If the makers of the biggest mainstream browsers (such as Mozilla or Google) were to contact them advocating for smaller projects by being browser-agnostic, then sites would probably be more willing to listen.

More support for smaller projects = less users with "mainstream" browsers = less money from malware partnership programs.

Reminder that Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit entity.

[Pause]

More support for smaller projects = less users with "mainstream" browsers = less money from malware partnership programs.

Reminder that Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit entity.

Of course, which is why it's another reason that shows that their web compatibility project is really for their own self interest rather than the benefit of the web as a whole.

[moonbat]

If the HTML CSS & Javascript standards hadn't become a joke with 'draft' changes every other day, there would be no need to talk about browser compatibility.
One single testsuite to run against any browser and see for yourself the compliance level would be all it would take, the way it did once upon a time. And if you run this on Pale Moon, you'll see that most of what it doesn't support are draft specs, with the exception of a few things like custom elements/shadow DOM (both work in progress) and WebRTC/DRM (both intentionally left out after user feedback).