Re: Unsupported Browser Notice

[Felix Miata]

JAS composed on 2019-04-29 18:48 (UTC-0600):

> FedEx site complains about my SM 2.49.4 when I use Delivery Manager 
> --Suggest Firefox 38 +


That used to annoy me, but "this" WFM for several years now (recently updated to
be 66.0 instead of 60.0):
about:config:
general.useragent.override.fedex.com
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0
-- 
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Re: Unsupported Browser Notice

[JAS]

NFN Smith wrote:

WaltS48 wrote:



They should develop for the W3C web standards, which Google, 
Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla and others are members of the consortium. No?







No objection from me.



So the site decided to no longer support Firefox 52 ESR which they 
have the right to do considering it is outdated.


True, although there are supported browsers based on the older work.  I 
don't know if Seamonkey is the only FF 52 browser out there, but that's 
something that's not uncommon for works that are forks of open source 
projects. However, I do know that in email, PostBox is based on a fairly 
old version of Thunderbird.  If I remember correctly, the PostBox 
developers forked a then-current copy of Thunderbird when their work 
started, and as far as I'm aware, they've never updated to a more 
current release. They've simply added their own stuff to that particular 
copy.




Can you access it using Firefox 52 ESR, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 or 59, 
older versions of IE, Chrome and Safari?


Removing the check mark for "Advertise Firefox Compatibility" fixes 
the problem for me in SM 2.49.4.


YMMV


When I checked, I looked at just current versions of Firefox, Chrome and 
Opera, although I might have checked FF 52 ESR.  I did not try to turn 
off Firefox compatibility, and I guess that that particular site 
operator is objecting to seeing "Seamonkey" and something else, even if 
they seem not to object to just "Seamonkey".


That said, I occasionally wonder if derivative projects based on other 
browsers (Iron, Epic, Comodo Dragon, etc.) have the same kinds of 
compatibility issues that Seamonkey users have had.  Or for that matter, 
some of the multi-engine browsers, such as Lunascape.


Smith
FedEx site complains about my SM 2.49.4 when I use Delivery Manager 
--Suggest Firefox 38 +

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Re: Unsupported Browser Notice

[GerardJan]

NFN Smith wrote:

EE wrote:



Is there some big deal about forged user-agents?  Why should the owner of a 
website care whether a user-agent is faked or not?  Besides, if the fake has 
all the navigator elements filled in properly, the fake is hard to detect.


There shouldn't be, but there is.

In the days of IE dominance, a lot of the issue was that sites demanding IE only 
had ActiveX scripting, which could not be run in other browsers.  Although there 
were extensions for Mozilla browsers, that still excluded non-Windows users.


Why can people not just validate their code with validator.w3.org?  Then they 
would not have to worry about their pages not working with some browsers.


They should, yes, but not all developers really care about standards, and some 
proportion would prefer to simply develop for one browser (usually the one that 
they use personally), and not bother testing their code against other browsers.  
With the growth of Google Chrome, that's now becoming more or less the standard 
that they're writing for.


With Mozilla-derived browsers, a user-agent override for a particular site 
seems to work fine.


With the demise of IE (and ActiveX scripting) and Chrome becoming the new de 
facto standard, I think that Google does enough with w3.org standards, I find it 
unusual that I have to resort to spoofing, especially with Seamonkey's ability 
to advertise Firefox compatibility.


However, the issues aren't so much a matter of compatibility of scripting 
capacity, but more often of user presentation.  Over the years, I've seen some 
number of sites (particularly financial services) that may be militant about 
demanding specific browsers, and exclusion of everything else. With Mozilla 
browsers, this is Firefox specifically, and I think that was the issue that 
finally caused the Seamonkey devs to add the option of Firefox compatibility.  
In my experience, I can't think of a case where I've seen a site that demands 
Firefox (even to the exclusion of Seamonkey with Firefox compatibility), but the 
site we're discussing here seems to be one of the very few exceptions.


With financial sites, I think the issue tends to be one of user support.  Thus, 
if a user is having problems with a particular site, and talks to the support 
people, the support people want a very short list of browsers that they have 
experience with, and where the support people can say, "Do this, this, that and 
this, and don't do that", and be done with it.  They don't want to hear "I'm 
running a different browser that just happens to have all the capabilities that 
you need".  From the perspective of the support people, they don't know how 
Seamonkey is different than Firefox, and so the standard response is "if it's 
not Firefox, we don't support it".  Some sites are willing to go the route of 
"use something else at your own risk", and some are more aggressive about 
disallowing use of anything other than their preferences.


If they're actively disallowing, then I think the primary thing that they're 
addressing is the case of a non-technical user that tends to consume a lot of 
help resources that is using a browser that they didn't install themselves, but 
where somebody else installed it for them.


I agree that such inflexibility is stupid, but at that point, you've entered the 
Dilbert sphere, where there's managerial decision-making made for technical 
issues by people that don't understand the technology.


Smith


+1

--
Gerard-Jan Vinkesteijn-Rudersdorff

https://facebook.com/gerardjan.vinkesteijn
Karl's version of Parkinson's Law:  Work expands to exceed the time alloted it.

Fedora20
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 
SeaMonkey/2.49.4

Build identifier: 20180711183816
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Re: Unsupported Browser Notice - SOLVED

[NFN Smith]

Felix Miata wrote:

Hmm! NOT advertising 'Firefox' fixed a problem!! That's different!! ;-)



I've been not advertising Firefox for more years than I can remember, with the
exception of 5 general.useragent.override.* settings, where Firefox and Windows
(instead of Linux) are advertised, and SeaMonkey is not.


An interesting shift, by historical standards.

For some years, the Seamonkey UA string showed only "Seamonkey", without 
reference to Firefox.  The rationale was that people wanted Seamonkey to 
show in activity logs, to show developers and admins that people are 
using Seamonkey, rather than Firefox.  I believe the height of this was 
when GeckoIsGecko was being promoted.  Adding the Firefox compatibility 
setting really did make a difference in lessening the frequency of 
having to resort to spoofing to get around sniffing and demands for 
Firefox only.


I do find it amusing that there is a site that will accept Seamonkey, 
but only if it's not advertising itself as Firefox compatible.


Beyond working around sites that demand specific browsers, I do find 
spoofing to be useful for sites that are aggressive in sniffing for 
platforms.


In my own work, I have a fairly substantial collection of downloaded 
software that I use for support purposes, and I have some number of Mac 
titles.  There's quite a few sites out there that offer both Windows and 
Mac versions of their work, and if you go to their download links, they 
try to detect your platform, and offer the download that's appropriate 
for the platform (and typically install immediately). For most users, 
that's appropriate, because it ensures that the user doesn't download 
the wrong package, whether the difference between Windows, Mac or Linux, 
or simply differentiating between 32 and 64 bit Windows builds


For where I am, I'm simply downloading to update my own repositories, 
and forcing a specific download based on my browser gets in the way. 
Thus, with on-the-fly spoofing which I do with PrefBar, if I'm working 
from Windows, I can set my UA to show that I'm running a Mac version of 
Firefox, if I need to get a Mac version of the download.


I also make occasional use of spoofing, when I'm tuning my own web site, 
when I'm adjusting the filters I use for rejecting bots with spoofed UA 
strings.  For those filters, I make enough use of regular expressions 
that it's useful to test specific UAs, to make sure the filters are 
behaving the way I want them to.


Smith
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Re: Unsupported Browser Notice

[NFN Smith]

EE wrote:



Is there some big deal about forged user-agents?  Why should the owner 
of a website care whether a user-agent is faked or not?  Besides, if the 
fake has all the navigator elements filled in properly, the fake is hard 
to detect.


There shouldn't be, but there is.

In the days of IE dominance, a lot of the issue was that sites demanding 
IE only had ActiveX scripting, which could not be run in other browsers. 
 Although there were extensions for Mozilla browsers, that still 
excluded non-Windows users.


Why can people not just validate their code with validator.w3.org?  Then 
they would not have to worry about their pages not working with some 
browsers.


They should, yes, but not all developers really care about standards, 
and some proportion would prefer to simply develop for one browser 
(usually the one that they use personally), and not bother testing their 
code against other browsers.  With the growth of Google Chrome, that's 
now becoming more or less the standard that they're writing for.


With Mozilla-derived browsers, a user-agent override for a particular 
site seems to work fine.


With the demise of IE (and ActiveX scripting) and Chrome becoming the 
new de facto standard, I think that Google does enough with w3.org 
standards, I find it unusual that I have to resort to spoofing, 
especially with Seamonkey's ability to advertise Firefox compatibility.


However, the issues aren't so much a matter of compatibility of 
scripting capacity, but more often of user presentation.  Over the 
years, I've seen some number of sites (particularly financial services) 
that may be militant about demanding specific browsers, and exclusion of 
everything else. With Mozilla browsers, this is Firefox specifically, 
and I think that was the issue that finally caused the Seamonkey devs to 
add the option of Firefox compatibility.  In my experience, I can't 
think of a case where I've seen a site that demands Firefox (even to the 
exclusion of Seamonkey with Firefox compatibility), but the site we're 
discussing here seems to be one of the very few exceptions.


With financial sites, I think the issue tends to be one of user support. 
 Thus, if a user is having problems with a particular site, and talks 
to the support people, the support people want a very short list of 
browsers that they have experience with, and where the support people 
can say, "Do this, this, that and this, and don't do that", and be done 
with it.  They don't want to hear "I'm running a different browser that 
just happens to have all the capabilities that you need".  From the 
perspective of the support people, they don't know how Seamonkey is 
different than Firefox, and so the standard response is "if it's not 
Firefox, we don't support it".  Some sites are willing to go the route 
of "use something else at your own risk", and some are more aggressive 
about disallowing use of anything other than their preferences.


If they're actively disallowing, then I think the primary thing that 
they're addressing is the case of a non-technical user that tends to 
consume a lot of help resources that is using a browser that they didn't 
install themselves, but where somebody else installed it for them.


I agree that such inflexibility is stupid, but at that point, you've 
entered the Dilbert sphere, where there's managerial decision-making 
made for technical issues by people that don't understand the technology.


Smith

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Re: Unsupported Browser Notice

[NFN Smith]

WaltS48 wrote:



They should develop for the W3C web standards, which Google, Microsoft, 
Apple, Mozilla and others are members of the consortium. No?







No objection from me.



So the site decided to no longer support Firefox 52 ESR which they have 
the right to do considering it is outdated.


True, although there are supported browsers based on the older work.  I 
don't know if Seamonkey is the only FF 52 browser out there, but that's 
something that's not uncommon for works that are forks of open source 
projects. However, I do know that in email, PostBox is based on a fairly 
old version of Thunderbird.  If I remember correctly, the PostBox 
developers forked a then-current copy of Thunderbird when their work 
started, and as far as I'm aware, they've never updated to a more 
current release. They've simply added their own stuff to that particular 
copy.




Can you access it using Firefox 52 ESR, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 or 59, 
older versions of IE, Chrome and Safari?


Removing the check mark for "Advertise Firefox Compatibility" fixes the 
problem for me in SM 2.49.4.


YMMV


When I checked, I looked at just current versions of Firefox, Chrome and 
Opera, although I might have checked FF 52 ESR.  I did not try to turn 
off Firefox compatibility, and I guess that that particular site 
operator is objecting to seeing "Seamonkey" and something else, even if 
they seem not to object to just "Seamonkey".


That said, I occasionally wonder if derivative projects based on other 
browsers (Iron, Epic, Comodo Dragon, etc.) have the same kinds of 
compatibility issues that Seamonkey users have had.  Or for that matter, 
some of the multi-engine browsers, such as Lunascape.


Smith
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Re: moznet retirement (was: Staying alive - how can I help?)

[Felix Miata]

Frank-Rainer Grahl composed on 2019-04-29 11:57 (UTC+0200):

> It is the usual spiel. Abuse bla bla bla and we won't have this. Even with 
> irc 
> you can kick and moderate users. This is imho just another attempt to silence 
> opinions they don't like. Bet the newsgroups will follow. 

There is already irc://freenode/#seamonkey. Is there any real reason to mourn
moznet's demise? Will not we all just move to freenode?
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools is religion, not science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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Re: Staying alive - how can I help?

[GerardJan]

Frank-Rainer Grahl wrote:

Reiner,

please send me an email.

FRG

Reiner Schug wrote:

Don Spam's Reckless Son wrote:

...

    Q: Why are we moving away from IRC? IRC is fine!
    A: IRC is not fine.

...
The rest of the article explains why this is to be considered so, and
yes - spam is part of that.



A: IRC is not fine.

new Q: WTF is wrong with IRC? Explain.

Why not make a fucking FaceBook Group instead?

"to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and 
productive."


Oh my god! Like we need a kindergarden...


not for me, i am not injected for the measles !



ciao



--
Gerard-Jan Vinkesteijn-Rudersdorff

https://facebook.com/gerardjan.vinkesteijn
Karl's version of Parkinson's Law:  Work expands to exceed the time alloted it.

Fedora20
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 
SeaMonkey/2.49.4

Build identifier: 20180711183816
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Re: Staying alive - how can I help?

[Frank-Rainer Grahl]

It is the usual spiel. Abuse bla bla bla and we won't have this. Even with irc 
you can kick and moderate users. This is imho just another attempt to silence 
opinions they don't like. Bet the newsgroups will follow.


FRG

Don Spam's Reckless Son wrote:
The rest of the article explains why this is to be considered so, and yes - 
spam is part of that.

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Re: Staying alive - how can I help?

[Frank-Rainer Grahl]

Reiner,

please send me an email.

FRG

Reiner Schug wrote:

Don Spam's Reckless Son wrote:

...

    Q: Why are we moving away from IRC? IRC is fine!
    A: IRC is not fine.

...
The rest of the article explains why this is to be considered so, and
yes - spam is part of that.



A: IRC is not fine.

new Q: WTF is wrong with IRC? Explain.

Why not make a fucking FaceBook Group instead?

"to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and 
productive."


Oh my god! Like we need a kindergarden...

ciao

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Re: Staying alive - how can I help?

[Reiner Schug]

Don Spam's Reckless Son wrote:

...

Q: Why are we moving away from IRC? IRC is fine!
A: IRC is not fine.

...
The rest of the article explains why this is to be considered so, and
yes - spam is part of that.



A: IRC is not fine.

new Q: WTF is wrong with IRC? Explain.

Why not make a fucking FaceBook Group instead?

"to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and 
productive."

Oh my god! Like we need a kindergarden...

ciao
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Re: Staying alive - how can I help?

[Don Spam's Reckless Son]

Reiner Schug wrote:

Frank-Rainer Grahl wrote:
 > What is needed mostly are helping hands. No volunteers/devs no 
SeaMonkey in
 > the long term. You can only do so much with money if you don't have 
the time

 > to support paid people.
Mozilla is completely nuts...

now they will shutdown their IRC servers, because
"In short, it’s no longer practical or responsible for us to keep that 
forum alive."


http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/

they have millions of $$$, morons...
next: shutdown newsgroups?

tell me where I can help, 20+ years using SM, Mozilla Suite, Netscape
C/C++/Web

ciao..



I read the article you linked to and you seem to have missed the point. 
Quoting from it:



Q: Why are we moving away from IRC? IRC is fine!
A: IRC is not fine.

Q: Seriously? You’re kidding, right?
A: I’m dead serious. 


The rest of the article explains why this is to be considered so, and 
yes - spam is part of that.


--
spammus ergo sum, viruses courtesy of https://www.nsa.gov/malware/
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