Here’s what’s new in mobile Web compatibility this week.

Firefox OS UA reverted

The Firefox OS user-agent (UA) has been reverted to include the “Android” token. It is not yet clear whether this is a temporary or permanent change. The Firefox OS UA is now:

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0

 Site testing and outreach

Jason Smith and I published the article Site Compatibility Testing for Firefox for Android on MDN. This article includes a short introduction to the compatibility issues that are present on the mobile Web and walks you through the compatibility test process from device setup to the test method and how to report your results. Send us any feedback on the article and, more importantly, start submitting your test results!

I smoke tested a number of sites for compatibility issues this week. Here’s a rundown of what I found.

Ads do not display on theweathernetwork.com. This issue appears to caused be UA sniffing. I still need to identify the ad provider and the root cause.

iG (ig.com.br) works well in Firefox for Android with the exception of their videos, which produce an error message. Without knowing the language, I gather that the error message states that Firefox can’t play the video format. This looks to be another case of UA sniffing as spoofing the UA to that of the Android stock browser allows the video to play.

The bablylon.com mobile site appears and functions in Firefox for Android but the site only has options for installing Android and iPhone apps. This is not an issue on Android but this content will not provide a good experience on Firefox OS.

The following sites have no mobile version: kijiji.ca, gc.ca, craigslist.ca, tdcanadatrust.com, royalbank.com, td.com, thepiratebay.se, rbcroyalbank.com, and bmo.com.