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Maniphest T810

PureBrowser incompatible with user-agent sniffing at www.giantitp.com
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Description

Posting this at least for info purposes, with a slight hope that perhaps this can be fixed within PureBrowser.

Website: www.giantitp.com

  • behavior on PureBrowser in PureOS: I see the Apache 2 Test Page on CentOS
  • behavior in every other browser, in PureOS, or other OSes on the same machine (Firefox, Brave, Epiphany, emacs web browser, whether in PureOS or macOS): I see the actual website (which is about a comic and some role-playing games)

With help from the Matrix chat, we've tracked this down to the user agent.

When I changed it to, for example.
"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; KIW-L21) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.143 Mobile Safari/537.36"

I was able to see the site.

Even with eww, whose user agent is: "URL/Emacs Emacs/26.1 (X11; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", I'm able to view the site normally..

I know this is more a matter of the web host handling of user agent, however perhaps the PureBrowser user agent could be tweaked somewhat for better compatibility? Otherwise, at least the issue is out here and might be helpful to someone else experiencing a similar issue on other websites.

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jeremiah.foster changed the task status from Open to Incomplete.Aug 21 2019, 17:01
jeremiah.foster added a subscriber: jeremiah.foster.

When I surf to the https://giantitp.com I get this message, which seems to point to some serious misconfiguration;

giantitp.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because it is self-signed.
The certificate is not valid for the name giantitp.com.
The certificate expired on April 26, 2014, 3:39 AM. The current time is August 21, 2019, 7:59 PM.

Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER

jonas.smedegaard added a subscriber: jonas.smedegaard.Aug 24 2019, 01:36

@jeremiah.foster It seems to me that the issue of using a self-signed certrificate is orthogonal to the issue reported here.

@patrixl Thanks for reporting!

jonas.smedegaard renamed this task from PureBrowser does not display one website, only default Apache page, other browsers are OK to PureBrowser incompatible with user-agent sniffing at www.giantitp.com.Aug 24 2019, 01:37
jonas.smedegaard added a parent task: T247: purebrowser: Choice of user-agent string lack a policy.
jonas.smedegaard triaged this task as Normal priority.Aug 24 2019, 01:39
• stefannagy added a subscriber: • stefannagy.Oct 2 2019, 06:52

I can confirm this issue.

I'm so glad I found this report. For two days (since I installed PureOS) I thought the offical website of the city of Vienna was down… I always got the error message "Page not found".
After changing the user agent as described in Firefox Compatibility Mode I can load the website again.

jonas.smedegaard closed this task as Wontfix.May 28 2021, 00:20
jonas.smedegaard claimed this task.

Purism has abandoned the development of PureBrowser for some time now.

PureOS now recommends using GNOME Web (a.k.a. Epiphany), and also provides Firefox ESR.