Vodafone proxy breaks some Javascript

I've been generally very happy with my vodafone USB modem, particularly after the unpleasant problems with Tiscali.  The Vodafone modem even works on Ubuntu, despite not being officially supported.  However, I have had problems with Javascript on a couple of sites.  They would work fine through non-Vodafone connections but break when used through Vodafone.

Thanks to David Pashley, I've now learned the problem.  Vodafone transform some of the content they deliver over the web.  One effect is degraded image quality (discussion of the problem and its solution in Germany is here and here).  The other problem is their use of minify, which is breaking some sites.  This was breaking the JQuery library included in a site of David's I use.

We resorted to loading the libraries over HTTPS, which is not a good general solution but works in this case.  Meanwhile I thought I'd make this entry in case it provides a pointer for anyone facing similar problems.

(Aplogies for the technical post.  If you've read this far and are disappointed, here a link to a kitten video --->  kittens )

Comments

[daveph]

There is a product that voda (at least in some terrorities) deployed to do this: bytemobile.

[Hatem seoudi]

is there a way to solve out the Flash USB problem, because i have made a website and the menu developed by java script is not displayed when using the USB modem, although it works great on the latest versions of IE8 / Firefox 3.5 / Chrome / Safari / Opera !

[James Burt]

Hatem -

I'm not sure what the best solution is for this. As I said above, my friend resorted to serving the javascript through HTTPS. While this has worked well, it's not an ideal situation. I'm sorry I can't offer a better solution.

James

[Hegyihedi]

Hi James,

I'm glad I've happened upon your blog post about Vodafone as I've been battling this problem for a while. I use NCBI's pubmed a lot and only recently did I realize that the page is broken up by vodafone. Now, it seems, both in Firefox and IE8. Only Foogle's Chrome won't let that happen (I am not sure why or how). Here is the link:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

If you type in an author's name (try mine: hegyi h) you will get the publications by named author (29 in my case). However, nothing happens either in Firefox or IE8 when I use my laptop with a vodafone mobile internet. If one looks at the source of the page, you'll see a lot of gibberish, apparently added by vodafone. I'm not sure why they do it, as it is not helping to reduce the data transfer, just the opposite: the page source will be bigger, much bigger in some cases. Why is this happening and what to do about it, I wonder? Is there a solution at all?! It is really annoying!

[James Burt]

Hello Hegyihedi,

I'm afraid I probably can't be much help here. In the end, I had to get the website I used to make some changes to evade Vodafone's transcoding.

I realise that's not very helpful. I hope you manage to find a solution.

James