Solved UK Royal Mail Click & Drop website needs win10

[peterh337]

Latest Chrome, Firefox (115 ESR) and Edge have stopped working on this website.

Unfortunately the bit which breaks is behind a login so I can't post a useful URL to it.

Can anyone guess what they may have done to achieve this stupid incompatibility? And could there be a fix?

The reason I don't just want to put win10 on this PC is that there is an irreplaceable app on it which may or may not run on win10. OK I know I can run it in a win7-64 VM but will then lose some functionality.

I can also run win10 (with just Chrome in it) in a VM but that VM is incredibly slow - 10 mins to start up and barely usable.

On a win10 laptop we have, the website runs fine.

Thank you for any ideas.

 

[SIW2]

I dont kinow anything about that site. I think there is browser called supermium

 

[michael diemer]

I would try R3dfox, a fork of Firefox, developed specifically to work on Windows 7. I tried it on vista and it even works there. It may solve your problem, or it may not, but worth a try. Eclipse r3dfox web browser

 

[peterh337]

Supermium works!

Thank you

 

[SIW2]

 

[dg1261]

Latest Chrome, Firefox (115 ESR) and Edge have stopped working on this website.
[...]
On a win10 laptop we have, the website runs fine.

Most likely, the website is examining your browser's User-Agent string and bailing when it notices you're on Win7. If you want to explore this, open your Firefox or Chrome and go to this test site to see what OS and browser version you're using. You'll probably find it will say you're on "Windows NT 6.1" (aka, Win 7).

If you repeat the test on Supermium (Chromium fork) or R3dfox (Firefox fork), you'll see those developers have altered the User-Agent string to pretend you're on Windows 10 (as well as a more recent Chrome or Firefox version). That's what makes these forks better for Win 7 users than the official Chrome or Firefox.

This masquerade will fake out the relatively simple check done by some websites such as the one you're dealing with, but be aware it won't fool some of the more stringent java tests or "I Am Not A Robot" captchas some sites use. For those, you're only option will be to change your OS. But in the meantime, Supermium and R3dfox buy us Win7 users some time.

 

[peterh337]

This is possible, but see this
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1kbuoct/royal_mail_tracking_page_still_broken_on_firefox/
It suggests that it is more complicated.
I've supervised various web development projects (server-side and also client-side JS) and I would bet that the devs in this case just didn't bother testing with older browsers. Such arrogant behaviour is common in large organisations where nobody "owns" (to use modern corporate BS term) customer service issues. I spoke to Royal Mail on the phone and was told by a stoopid and arrogant woman (who was obviously clueless) that I must update the OS.
I have even seen banks here test only with Edge and not Chrome Chrome is about 45%, Safari is about 45%, and most of the remaining 10% is FF, so testing just with Edge is a laugh. I run one community site (the foregoing browser stats are from there) and if we did that we would have huge problems.
M$ still support win7 - see the Simplix update which is well known on this great site

 

[dg1261]

This is possible, but see this
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1kbuoct/royal_mail_tracking_page_still_broken_on_firefox/
It suggests that it is more complicated.
I've supervised various web development projects (server-side and also client-side JS) and I would bet that the devs in this case just didn't bother testing with older browsers.

The fact you've reported the site works fine under Win 7 with either Supermium or R3dfox would contradict that. If the only difference between one browser and another is the User-Agent string they send in the HTTP header, and the site works fine in one browser and not the other, that makes it pretty evident that it's not the underlying OS nor the underlying browser code that makes a difference. It has to be how the webserver code reacts to what's in that User-Agent string.

Sites like banks, financial institutions, governments, et al, are not primarily concerned with whether old browsers still work or whether the website devs tested with older browsers. The companies are far more concerned with covering their own backsides from potential lawsuits, and their lawyers are telling them they're at higher risk of being found negligent -- even for something unrelated -- if they don't at least try to get customers to use allegedly "more secure" OSes or browser versions.

As a consequence, many such sites will make at least a half-hearted attempt and take the shortest route by simply looking at the User-Agent string. A few of the more serious sites will use stronger measures such as java applets or the like to sniff out the actual underlying OS, despite what the User-Agent string says.

 

[peterh337]

Unfortunately the part which fails to work is behind a login, so I can't supply a demonstration, but it is deep down in the menus. Basically you create an "order" where you specify the type size weight etc of package(s) you are sending, and then you create a "manifest" which gets sent to Royal Mail and which triggers the billing. Separately you need to arrange collection of the package(s). The failure is where you go to create the manifest. The site just hung at the point where the data was being sent to the RM server. So it doesn't look like a deliberate attempt to enforce browser or OS recency or whatever. It looks like they are using some marginal HTML or JS code which works only on the more recent browsers, and of course you don't get those unless you are on win10... It is however interesting to note that Chrome, FF and Edge all stopped working at around the same time - for me, a week or so ago, and more weeks ago for other people.

On one community site I supervise, we found that some operations (e.g. image upload, deliberately implemented purely in PHP and not using any of the libs like e.g. Dropzone) failed to work with specific versions of IOS and Safari, but worked with later versions. On another site, which was written in Ruby on Rails about 15 years ago (yeah I know what you are gonna say ) we found the login cookies would not store in the database (MariaDB) so people had to login every time they visited, but it was only a few IOS users, and the issue mysteriously disappeared with some Apple IOS (or Safari) update.

If Royal Mail wanted to enforce browser/OS recency they could just tell you, early on, rather than insert a weird "hang" failure deep down which must be creating a lot of support desk traffic (which they must absolutely hate because they are a really inept outfit - google for Royal Mail Horizon accounting software scandal). So my money is on their devs assuming some specific chromium browser behaviour.

I am an embedded dev (C, STM arm32) and implemented a simple web server for product config. This has a firmware upload feature, which can be done entirely in HTML but works much better (progress bar, etc) if you have some client-side JS. Had some fun with different browsers on that too, so I am prepared to believe anything

 

[dg1261]

Unfortunately the part which fails to work is behind a login, so I can't supply a demonstration, but it is deep down in the menus. Basically you create an "order" where you specify the type size weight etc of package(s) you are sending, and then you create a "manifest" which gets sent to Royal Mail and which triggers the billing. Separately you need to arrange collection of the package(s). The failure is where you go to create the manifest. The site just hung at the point where the data was being sent to the RM server.

Ah, okay. I thought you implied Supermium worked and solved the problem.

For the problem you're describing, though, I think your analysis makes sense. There's undoubtedly a lot of scripting to pull off that kind of complex processing, and maybe there are some script functions they're relying on that aren't available in Win 7.

 

[peterh337]

Supermium solved the problem, and allows the RM site to work on win7-64.