Strange behavior of the 3.1 messenger bar with a broken user agent string ?

Question

Hello,

I seems that a broken user-agent string causes a strange display of the messenger bar. The bar is displayed on the middle of the screen instead of the bottom. Observed with toolkit 3.1 and MSIE 8 (but not tested with another versions).
The user agent string :

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3)

Both css for IE6 and IE7 are downloaded during the bar initialization. Might be the cause ?
A simpliest user-agent string from a browser on another PC does not reproduce the bug.
Regards,

Stephane

Answer 1

It looks like the page was displayed in IE 8 Compatibility View. Does it work correctly when not in comptability view?


Offir

Answer 2

Actually it's bug reported by one of our customer, on one of our website that forces the IE8 compatibility mode to work correctly, so I can't test what you suggest.
But I remember I had the same issue one day on my own development PC : bar on the middle of the screen (compatibility mode or not), and a user agent reported as too long and corrupted (by http://www.fiddlertool.com/ua.aspx). And just by tweaking the user-agent in the registry to make it simpliest as possible, the bar worked again...
Moreover, by changing today the user agent on my PC using UA Picker (http://www.enhanceie.com/ietoys/uapick.asp) to my customer's one, I reproduce the problem on a simple page containing only the messenger bar (3.1 and 3.5).

Answer 3

Stephane,

In this case, it is unclear what the correct behavior is. The browser is claiming to be both IE 6 and IE 7. These two browser versions have some significant differences in their CSS processing. "Guessing" which one to pick means it may be broken if the wrong one was chosen.

We will add this scenario to our test cases and try to evaluate the best approach here.

Thanks for reporting this!


Offir Bakshitz [MSFT]