Last week we spent some time tracking down the cause of incidents reported at www.dnnsoftware.com regarding folks inability to login (read here). After narrowing the problem down to a recent Google Chrome update (to version 29.0.1547.57 m), it soon became apparent this was a browser detection issue… which led us to our partners at 51 Degrees. These guys work a lot of browser magic which not only results in web browser detection, but also attributes of over 30,000 devices enabling highly responsive mobile, tablet and alternative device design. Cool stuff, but I digress.
Here is some background on the issue from James Rosewell at 51 Degrees:
“Initial assessment appears to be a twin issue:
1) Something went wrong in our communication with Google concerning the release of Chrome 29 and new user agents. Usually we will have 2 weeks’ notice which is more than enough to incorporate into the device data updates.
2) The default profile for Chrome indicates Javascript as not supported by the browser.
Therefore Chrome 29 wasn’t known about and fell back to the default profile which told .NET that Javascript wasn’t supported by the browser. This would then generate issues with Javascript controls.
The issue is very similar to the one Microsoft had with the .browser file that originally came with version 2 and 4 of .NET. You can read more on Scott Hanselman’s blog.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BugAndFixASPNETFailsToDetect
The fail safe solution is to change the default profile for Chrome (used when new versions come out that are not version detected) to default to indicate Javascript support.
We will address the issue between ourselves and Google concerning new versions of Chrome and the useragents used.
We have posted the following blog on our site for all Premium customers.
http://51degrees.mobi/Blog/TabId/553/ArtMID/1641/ArticleID/175/Chrome-29
Please direct any impacted DNN users to this post. We will have people monitoring the Contact Us messages, forums and twitter, etc over the weekend to ensure we can help any customers who have been impacted.”
We really appreciate the folks at 51 Degrees and how quickly they responded to this issue! Some of our own Engineers and MVP’s (notably, Robb Bryn, thanks Robb!) also spent a great deal of time isolating this mysterious problem.
But we are pleased to say that DNN Platform (ie. Community Edition) users were unaffected and all other customers were updated within just a couple of days.