Adsense breaks in older version of Netscape / Mozilla

Sporadic 404's occur

[notsleepy]

I think I have found an Adsense bug. I was testing my site in Netscape 4.08 and found that I was occassionally being bounced to my 404 page.

After an hour of narrowing down the problem, I found that the issue only exists when the Adsense code is present on the page. To verify Adsense was the problem, I created a page that *only* contains my AdSense code.

When I continually hit refresh on this page it will eventually bounce to the 404 page. It seems that Adsense tries to make a request on the URL "null". I cannot reproduce this problem in any other browser. I do have Javascript turned on in the Netscape browser

After doing a grep on my access logs for "null" I found that there were quite a few instances of this and it all occurred in users that were using older versions of Mozilla.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[notsleepy]

Response from Google:
"Thank you very much for bringing this issue to our attention. Currently we only support Netscape versions greater than 6.0. I recommend upgrading your Netscape to one of these versions.

Please feel free to email us at [e-mail] if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email [e-mail]."

Great. Now I have to write code to detect the user's browser and not show Adsense if the browser is < v6.0.

[blairsp]

I am actually surprised you could get it to work at all. I tried to load my page in netscape(Vers 4.x) and nothing at all appeared-something to do with the Iframe I think.

[danny]

I think he's talking about AdSense *ads* breaking in older Netscapes. I've seen the same thing -- it shows up in my logs as a request for mydomain.com/null.

I've seen it with Netscape 4.6 on Linux.

[annej]

I gave up on old Netscape browsers a couple of years ago as I use CSS. My stats show that very few visitors come in on these old browssers and I suspect they aren't the ones likely to purchase anything online.

As my DH pointed out, why worry if your site looks like c**p since most of the sites they go to using those browsers look terrible.

[blairsp]

I think he's talking about AdSense *ads* breaking in older Netscapes

Sorry thats what I mean't. I could get the page to show up but not the ads(at all).

[jomaxx]

I see the same 404 errors (redirecting to "/null") in my log every day. One solution would be to use PHP in order to not show AdSense to older browsers.

[notsleepy]

blairsp:
I too never see ad's in the old version of Netscape. The horrible side effect is that Netscape somehow bounces the entire page to my 404 page. In other words the page bounces to a 404 error before it finishes loading.

jomaxx:
Yes I could work around the problem by detecting the browser version and not displaying the ads. It just sucks that I have to code around this problem. I feel like AdSense should be smart enough to not attempt to display ads on old Mozilla based browsers. I'm not a Javascript guru though and perhaps they have no choice due to the inadequecies of the scripting language.

[danny]

I found the forcing a redirect from "null" to the directory it's in works. In Apache, in a .htaccess file, that's:

RewriteRule ^(.*)/null$ [mydomain.com...] [L,R=301]

[notsleepy]

Great idea Danny! Thanks!