Ken Rudolph wrote:
Chase Bank is insisting that soon they are going to refuse to access their site with my "outdated" browser. Of course my SeaMonkey browser is up to date (Win 7, SM 2.39); but they don't accept SeaMonkey as an approved browser. I would like to change my User Agent that is sent out to Firefox 30.0 or something similar to spoof them. Could somebody please tell me EXACTLY STEP BY STOP how to do this even for an idiot like me! The alternate is to give up SeaMonkey and I don't want to do that.
It's been a while since I've had to access Chase, but I know that their web developers have a long history of brain-deadness on browsers.
From their perspective, they only want to support as few browsers as they can, and they seem not to get it that any browser that uses Gecko should work fine. Thus, instead of sniffing for "Gecko", they explicitly for Firefox branding, and it looks like they're explicitly rejecting a User Agent string that doesn't have Firefox as the last point. Thus, rejection of any Gecko browser, where the UA implies that it might not be "Firefox". In their view, "we can't support 47 different browsers".
It's noteworthy that the UA strings for Internet Explorer and Chrome (and I believe Safari, as well) all advertise Mozilla compatibility. I also wonder if they object to various browsers that are Chrome-derived, such as Opera, Chromium, Iron, Comodo Dragon, Epic, etc....
Personally, I prefer PrefBar. I got started using that one for browser spoofing, but I found that I like the capacity it offers for quick tweaks of other settings, as well. Some time ago, I played with User Agent Switcher, and it seemed to be overly complex to me.
Once PrefBar is installed, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Pref Bar. In the UI, you'll need to drag User Agent pref from the Available pane to the Enabled Pane. From there, double click on User Agent, and you can define whatever UA strings you want.
(I don't remember if you have to enable display of PrefBar manually, but if it doesn't appear, then you'll need to go to View -> Show/Hide, and make sure that PrefBar is selected.)
The one minor complaint that I have with PrefBar is that the strings that are shown in a new installation are quite old, and you'll have to do editing to get more current strings. If you happen to have Firefox installed, you can go to about:support, and copy a live string, from your own installation.
There's also a number of collections of strings out there, including http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/browser_ids.htm, http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php and https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Latest-user-agent-strings. These may not quite have the latest combination of Firefox 45.0.1, and underlying platforms, but they're close enough that you can copy, and then edit to display appropriate version numbers.
In this context, I will note that beyond spoofing browser, I occasionally will spoof a platform, as well. I maintain a rather extensive collection of downloaded software, for tech support work (which allows me to troubleshoot machines that aren't connected to the Internet). I've found that there's a number of sites out there that do browser sniffing to determine which platform, and if my UA is showing "windows", they try to download a Windows version (assuming that I'm planning on an immediate install on my own computer). Thus, if I spoof Mac in my UA, I can get a Mac version of the download, in Windows.
One other consideration -- if you're spoofing in Seamonkey, that applies not only your browser, but what is put in your outbound mail, as well. I run the Display Mail User Agent extension (which I find useful for quickly knowing what mail or news client a person is using). Occasionally, when I'm filing stuff from my Sent folder, I'll notice that a message will show an orange Firefox logo, rather than a blue Seamonkey logo, and that tells me that I forgot to reset spoofing, when I was done with needing it.
Smith _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list support-seamonkey@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
