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Wikipedia doesn't work on the BlackBerry since the migration to Vector
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Description

There have been several reports about Wikipedia not working on the BlackBerry since the migration to Vector - in comments on Wikimedia blog, in [[:en:Wikipedia:User experience feedback]], in OTRS etc.

I didn't actually experience it myself, because i don't have a BlackBerry device, but it probably should appear here, so i would be able to tell people on OTRS that the developers were notified.


Version: unspecified
Severity: critical
OS: other
Platform: Other

Details

Reference
bz23554

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 11:04 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz23554.

Would be nice if this report included a description of "doesn't work".

(In reply to comment #1)

Would be nice if this report included a description of "doesn't work".

The best description that i know is http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/48051 , and you know it too. Sorry for not being able to be more helpful.

It seems this is caused by a bug in Blackberry causing it to crash when trying to render larger pages. This seems to be on Blackberry's side, not ours, so recommending INVALID.

Googling "blackberry 413" yielded this page, providing a possible solution: http://thebackroomtech.com/2009/06/23/fix-http-error-413-request-entity-too-large-on-blackberry/ . It should also be noted that newer (?) Blackberry models don't seem to have this problem.

It may be BlackBerry's fault, but what should i say to the people who ask me about it on OTRS?

Isn't it possible to identify that a less-supported browser is trying to access Wikipedia and send the user a leaner page as a response?

Here's a comment that i received from a BlackBerry user through OTRS:


The message that is given after the page crashes is: "uncaught exception: java.lang.class cast exception"

Please note that this message comes up with EVERY page.

(In reply to comment #5)

Here's a comment that i received from a BlackBerry user through OTRS:


The message that is given after the page crashes is: "uncaught exception:
java.lang.class cast exception"

Please note that this message comes up with EVERY page.

This is a Java exception, but we don't use any Java at all (we use JavaSCRIPT, but that's not the same thing). This looks like an exception in BlackBerry's code itself (which is presumably written in Java), providing more evidence that this is really a bug in BlackBerry.

That's what i thought myself, but yet again - can't we just send BlackBerry users the old version?

  • Bug 23668 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I can add Blackberry to the list of agents that is auto redirected to the mobile wikipedia website, but since that is clientside Javascript, i'm not sure the code will be executed before the error occurs. I rather doubt it actually.

What's the status of this?

Hasn't it been added to mobile yet? There was another report today, so if was, it isn't working http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Comentarios_sobre_experiencia_de_usuario&
diff=38026209&oldid=38024474

Platonides, the mobile redirect for BlackBerries was enabled on eswiki as part of the deployment of the WikimediaMobile extension on June 16, so this report predates it. You can see on http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/InitialiseSettings.php.txt grepping for the
'wmgUseWikimediaMobile' switch in which wikis it is currently active. We've had a hard time reproducing this problem in the first place, and we've asked folks in a few places to report if it's still broken for them now, but I'll ask Tomasz/Hampton to elaborate here re: the current state of BB testing.

Taking this bug for now. As Erik pointed we've chosen to enable the mobile redirect by default for Blackberry users as dropping vectors file size to the level of what some Blackberrys can handle is out of the scope of the current dev work.

So far I've tested both en.m AND en (vector) with the following Blackberry models and seen no issues

8350i
8800
9700

Later this week (Wed) we'll test with the

8120
8900
9550

to confirm if there are any more outstanding issues.

The 8120 test will be the key one as that's a fairly old BlackBerry Pearl model. We'll be looking to see if the page size is low enough so that the redirect actually happens. If not were going to push more aggressively toward a server side redirect.

(In reply to comment #12)

...
So far I've tested both en.m AND en (vector) with the following Blackberry
models and seen no issues

8350i
8800
9700
...

Correction on the tested working models

8350i
9550 (not 8800)
9700

More confirmed working models from our in house non emulator testing.

8120
9550

The 8900 is a bit odd as it doesn't redirect but does show the BlackBerry user agent string.

8330 OS (4.3) Firmware v4.3.0.127 correctly redirects but reports "A problem occurred while trying to render the page" and tries to render the page but then crashes the browser.

8330 OS (4.5) Firmware v4.5.0.77 also redirects but does not display vector

8330 OS (4.0) Firmware v5.0.0.438 works perfectly for both

8130 OS (4.3) Firmware V4.3.071 correctly redirects to mobile and also correctly displays Vector.

So i can confirm that 8330's upgraded to the latest firmware works correctly.

Resolving. Please reopen if your still seeing this happen.