www.booking.com - Server sends JPEG2000 images in the Raw HTML to Safari on iOS

[karlcow]

URL: https://www.booking.com/hotel/us/milpitas-40-ranch-drive.html

Browser / Version: Safari 17.4
Operating System: iOS 17.4
Tested Another Browser: Yes Firefox

Problem type: Design is broken
Description: Images not loaded
Steps to Reproduce:

1. On iPhone with Safari
2. Go to https://www.booking.com/hotel/us/milpitas-40-ranch-drive.html

Expected:
See the images

Actual:
Images are not visible.

View the screenshot

Browser Configuration

• gfx.webrender.software: false
• blockList: basic
• hasTouchScreen: false
• frameworks: {'fastclick': False, 'mobify': False, 'marfeel': False}
• mixed active content blocked: false
• mixed passive content blocked: false
• tracking content blocked: false

View console log messages

From webcompat.com with ❤️

[karlcow]

booking.com is doing a combination of User-Agent and Accept HTTP headers sniffing.
Safari on iOS is receiving JPEG2000 (extension .jp2) images in raw HTML responses, while Firefox on Android is receiving simple JPEG (extension .jpg).

JPEG2000

    <img class="swpg__image swpg__image--cover-y js-preloaded-low-res-image"
         src="https://cf.bstatic.com/xdata/images/hotel/max200/217608701.jp2?k=3fe774144faa575ffcce19274fe85b5e43227fba1568cb612902b40a6dced873&o=&hp=1"
         alt="a building with palm trees in front of it at Larkspur Landing Milpitas-An All-Suite Hotel in Milpitas"
         onerror="" />

JPEG

<img class="swpg__image swpg__image--cover-y js-preloaded-low-res-image"
         src="https://cf.bstatic.com/xdata/images/hotel/max200/217608701.jpg?k=3fe774144faa575ffcce19274fe85b5e43227fba1568cb612902b40a6dced873&o=&hp=1"
         alt="a building with palm trees in front of it at Larkspur Landing Milpitas-An All-Suite Hotel in Milpitas"
         onerror="" />

We determined that this was due to a combination of User-Agent and Accept headers.

Firefox on Android is sending for HTML resources

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 11; SAMSUNG SM-G973U) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) SamsungBrowser/14.2 Chrome/87.0.4280.141 Mobile Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8

Safari on iOS is sending for HTML resources:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

But if we use the Safari on iOS User Agent with the accept header of Firefox:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8

Booking.com is sending the normal JPG in the raw HTML response.

Note: Safari on MacOS with the same Accept header receives the normal JPEG.

Why does it matter?

On https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178758
WebKit is removing the support for JPEG2000
This will be released in future versions of Safari.
See the Pull Request WebKit/WebKit#3824

So booking.com needs to fix their HTTP responses and not single out Safari.
Both Firefox and Chrome do not support JPEG2000.

Relevant bug in Firefox https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=jpeg2000
Relevant bug in Chrome https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41350700
And https://caniuse.com/jpeg2000

Moving to needscontact

[karlcow]

@bookingcom is on GitHub and currently list 9 people.

Maybe @andrew-grechkin could help us find the right person at Booking.com to solve this server side issue which will send broken JPEG images on Safari on iOS in the future.

[karlcow]

Note that if there is no fix on the side of booking.com, the WebKit team will have to implement a Quirk to trick the server into sending simple JPEGs.
This is https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269875

[andrew-grechkin]

I have passed this issue to our engineers responsible for front-end and iOS. Now we need to wait a little bit.

[karlcow]

@andrew-grechkin Thanks a lot.
In the process of creating a Quirk at the same time if necessary.
We can remove it when this is resolved on your side.
WebKit/WebKit#24923

[lucrocha]

Hi. Booking.com no longer sends jp2 files (since 20240308).

[karlcow]

Thanks @lucrocha
Wonderful. Do not hesitate to reach out to me for any future issues about WebKit.

I will remove the Quirk!