Jay O'Brien wrote:
Can you provide a reference to the steps necessary to accommodate the
spoofing and the text of the spoofs? I would really like to read up
on the process before I jump into it.
BTW, I run SeaMonkey 2.0.13 on XP and on Win7-64bit.
Take a look at the PrefBar extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/prefbar/, and look at
the settings for "User Agent".
Although the UA strings provided are quite old (e.g., Firefox 2.0.0,
Mozilla 1.7.13, Netscape 6.2, IE 6.0), they provide the necessary form
for putting in current information.
The settings I most often use for spoofing are Seamonkey (as Firefox),
and Firefox 3.6.16 under Windows XP, specifically:
js:useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US;
rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 SeaMonkey/2.0.13 NOT Firefox/3.6.16"
and
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10)
Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.16
I don't have IETab installed at the moment, and once in a great while, I
will spoof IE 6 with:
js:useragent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)";
appname="Microsoft Internet Explorer"; appversion="4.0 (compatible;
MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"; platform="Win32";
I also have spoofs set up for Firefox 3.6.16 under Mac OS 10.6, Lynx and
Opera, although those generally proof-of-concept ones that I don't
usually use.
For knowing what to put, it helps that I have access to Apache logs on a
server, and so I can see what's actually being shown by various browsers.
A couple of additional useful links...
The general form of user agent strings (and includes examples):
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_user_agent_string_reference. This
one includes notes that are current, as of Firefox 4.0 and Seamonkey
2.1, including Seamonkey making direct reference to Firefox.
David Ross' notes on defeating browser sniffing:
http://www.rossde.com/internet/sniffing.html
With versions of Seamonkey prior to 2.1, it's easy enough to spoof
Firefox, but it's one where it's better to not spoof, unless absolutely
necessary. If you're using Seamonkey, you want that turning up in logs,
so that developers can't say "nobody uses Seamonkey" (or for that matter
Camino, Galeon, or other Gecko-derived browsers). Thus, if you have to
spoof, the form that shows "Seamonkey" in the UA string is preferred, so
that that information is in the logs, and that the critical information
is not "Firefox", but "Gecko".
Thus, although you can set the the UA string in prefs.js, my preference
is to do it on the fly with PrefBar, and spoof only when needed.
Smith
