David H. Durgee wrote:
Looks like you hit the nail on the head! Despite my expectations, the
about: display reflects the UA as specified on the PrefBar setting!
When I changed this to "Real UA" I now see:
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/41.0 SeaMonkey/2.38
Build identifier: 20150923193515
So despite the Build identifier being unaffected the user agent is.
Given this I guess I need to update PrefBar to reflect Firefox 41.
If you're using PrefBar, it's probably best to leave the UA setting at
"Real UA" most of the time, and do spoofing only at times that you need
another setting. Then switch back to Real UA, when the need for the
spoof is completed.
Although I'm enthusiastic about using PrefBar (and my original
installation was to allow for spoofing), I've found it very rare that I
need to spoof a different browser, at least for getting around sites
that do browser-sniffing improperly, and demand Firefox specifically,
rather than Gecko (and Firefox as one among several Gecko-based
browsers). I can't think of a time that I've needed to to spoof since
the time that the default Seamonkey UA string was adjusted to include
"Firefox".
The place where I most frequently use spoofing is with software
downloads. For doing tech support, I have a collection of downloaded
software, and some sites are aggressive at using the UA to determine
what platform you're running, and offering a download, based on what's
found. For me, if I'm working from Windows, it makes it more difficult
to download a Mac installer on Windows, and the fast way around that is
to spoof my browser, so that it shows that my platform is Mac.
For what it's worth, addons.mozilla.org does that kind of sniffing in
the Firefox section. For a couple of months, I found that if I was
downloading from the Firefox section (even extensions that explicitly
support Seamonkey), that the Download button would not allow me to
download, not even "Save Target as", if I was showing a Seamonkey UA.
Easy enough to get around by spoofing Firefox, and I did complain about
that in this forum. Since then, there's now a separate link for
"download anyway", and I don't have to do spoofing anymore.
One thing that I've found is that if I leave spoofing enabled, then it
also applies to the User-Agent header that the mail client inserts in
message headers. I run the Display User Agent extension, and sometimes,
if I'm working on filing copies of sent mail, I may see a message that
shows not the familiar Seamonkey logo, but a Firefox logo, which is
something that should not be in an email message.
When I see that, it's a reminder that I need to turn off spoofing, and
go back to using the Real UA.
Of course, the other reason to use Real UA as your normal setting, is
that when you do a version upgrade of Seamonkey, then you're showing the
current version.
For me, I do have several spoof strings defined in PrefBar (and the
default settings are *really* old), but I update those, when it's
necessary to do so. Thus, if I'm spoofing Firefox, I think I have all
those strings still set to show 39.0.0.
Smith
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