Bug 11764 – buy.com shopping cart box disabled in Safari

• Component: Evangelism
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[rahul abrol]

buy.com, for example, has disabled their shopping cart box (top right of page) exclusively in safari.  i'm not sure why (they didn't respond to my queries), since enabling it manually and testing shows no errors.

they're using navigator.vendor to identify safari.  i was thinking of a simple fix to allow spoofing, like:

Index: WebCore/bindings/js/kjs_navigator.cpp
===================================================================
--- WebCore/bindings/js/kjs_navigator.cpp       (revision 18029)
+++ WebCore/bindings/js/kjs_navigator.cpp       (working copy)
@@ -181,6 +181,8 @@ JSValue* Navigator::getValueProperty(Exe
   case ProductSub:
     return jsString("20030107");
   case Vendor:
+    if (userAgent.find("Safari") == -1)
+      return jsString("");
     return jsString("Apple Computer, Inc.");
   case VendorSub:
     return jsString("");

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

Changing sense of this bug to be a buy.com evangelism issue.

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

Confirming that the shopping cart box does not appear in a locally-built debug build of WebKit r18014 on Mac OS X 10.4.8 (8L127).

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

Created attachment 11749 [details]
Screenshot of shopping cart box from Firefox 2.0

[rahul abrol]

actually i was just using buy.com as an example.  i meant for the bug to be about improving user agent spoofing.  i guess i'll leave it to someone more knowledgeable to decide if it's worth filing a separate bug for that.

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> actually i was just using buy.com as an example.  i meant for the bug to be
> about improving user agent spoofing.  i guess i'll leave it to someone more
> knowledgeable to decide if it's worth filing a separate bug for that.

That tends to be a slippery slope.  Once you start making small modifications here and there for individual web sites, it may start affecting other sites adversely that want to support the browser properly.

Also, changing the web site to support a browser properly is a lot easier (only has to be changed in one or a few places) than changing the browser code itself (which must be distributed to thousands, if not millions, of users).

Having said that, it's good that you spotted this difference in behavior!  I don't think I would have spotted it, especially if I hadn't used anything other than Safari to browse the web.

[rahul abrol]

FWIW, here's the response i just got from buy.com:

"Buy.com can only be accessed by using internet explorer. Buy.com can not be accessed by another web browser."

touché.

[rahul abrol]

site redesigned, no longer a buy.com issue.

marking as WONTFIX, since spoofing patch was ignored.