TCW wrote:
On 6/12/2018 11:58 PM, Daniel wrote:
TCW wrote on 12/06/18 23:17:
But be aware that even with the "Advertise Firefox" setting set, some
sites still act up. Seems some now only work if Firefox is the only
Browser mentioned so kick up a stink if SeaMonkey and Firefox are
mentioned .... or if Firefox and SeaMonkey are mentioned.
Some, hereabouts, have suggested creating a UserAgent pref that would
apply to the specific, troublesome, site.
I don't think it will completely not load. I mean, come on. Do you know
how many people that would affect? It's like pointing a gun in someone's
face and saying they *have* to use this browser or else. Doesn't work
that way. They'll lose money and issue a mea culpa.
A lot depends on how a site is built. The most common way of browser
handling is via scripting that checks the presented User Agent string.
Some sites may simply grumble about an unsupported browser, others may
not allow additional access. And if you block scripting with something
such as NoScript, you may not see complaints at all.
There's also non-scripting ways of forcing compliance. On the web site
I maintain, I have several rules in place that reject connections by
certain browser IDs. In my case, I use those for forged UAs, because I
know that the access is malicious. There's one operation that shows
browser access as "Firefox 40.1" (a version which was never valid). If
somebody goes to this site with a browser that's showing that, the
connection will be rejected with a 403 error (and it's something I've
tested with a spoofed UA string.)
Mostly, browser sniffing is simply looking for an acceptable version
level. Thus, as noted elsewhere in this thread, sites are increasingly
complaining about UA strings that show Firefox 52, not knowing (or
caring) that Firefox 52.x ESR (and other Mozilla derivatives that are
based on that) are valid browsers, with current support. I think a lot
of the complaints that are coming from sites that have decided that
anything that's before 57.0 and Quantum should not be used.
On the other hand, there are sites that will object if they see anything
other than a valid Firefox UA string. That would be one that has all
the appropriate Firefox data but also shows the current Seamonkey
version (which is what you get if you use "Advertise Firefox". I know
that chase.com has a reputation of problems there, but personally, I've
never had problems there if I set the UA string to stock Firefox
(without advertising compatibility). I've never bothered to check to see
if other browsers that do similar compatibility advertising have
problems at Chase. That would include things like PaleMoon, or Opera (a
Chromium derivative), which shows a Chrome UA, and then notes
Opera-specific version info.
There's a variety of reasons that a site may object to Seamonkey (or an
ESR version of Firefox);
- Security. It's not unreasonable to expect a reasonably current version
that's updated on security patches. I don't maintain our corporate web
site, but I do know that there's a minimum version of Firefox that's
considered to be acceptable.
- Support. For consumer-facing sites (especially financial sites), it's
really common for the support people to demand a limited number of
browsers, and I think this is the issue at Chase. Management decides "we
only support browsers X, Y and Z", and if they find you're running
anything else and you need their help, they'll end the conversation.
Ultimately, this is the same attitude as from 20 years ago, when sites
were supporting IE only. They simply didn't want to bother with any
variations. Thus, even though Seamonkey is derived from Firefox, and
runs the same Gecko engine (and has all the same capacities), a
difference as simple as getting to configs by going to Hamburger Menu ->
Options, and a tab-centric interface in Firefox, as opposed to
Seamonkey's Edit -> Preferences, and a tree-oriented UI is more than
they want to bother with. From a support standpoint, they want to *know*
what the user is seeing, and not have to guess at UI variants.
- Indifference/laziness: Some devs don't know (or care to know) about
derivative projcts, and why people may want to use them. On their part,
"one size fits all" is a whole lot easier for them. But that's not
really much different than software developers that set their installers
to default to all _their_ preferred options, with the expectation that
most users won't bother to change the defaults.
Smith
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