Chuck wrote:
For those of us who are not experts in this sort of thing would someone
post an explaination of this?
Chuck
Others have already responded to this, and I'll leave it to the links
they posted to address most of the mechanics. In Seamonkey, the easiest
way of doing spoofing is via extension (using the older XUL structure
and not WebExtensions versions that run in current versions of Firefox).
Either User Agent Switcher or PrefBar work. Personally, I prefer
PrefBar, but either is workable. It's also possible to do per-site
spoofing via settings in your prefs.js file.
If you set up spoofing, one thing that you have to do regularly is to
update your strings to match more or less current versions of what
you're trying to spoof. Thus, if you occasionally need to show a
Firefox UA, you'll want it to show something close to the current
Firefox 60.0.2, rather than something old, like Firefox 38.0.
For me, I find three common reasons to do spoofing:
1) Sites that demand particular browsers (or versions). Historically,
the issue has been with sites that claim to support only IE, Google
Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Those problems mostly went away a few years
ago when the Seamonkey devs added "Advertise Firefox Compatibility" as a
config setting. That one causes Seamonkey to show a Firefox UA string,
and then appends Seamonkey detail at the end. That's a common thing for
browsers that are derivatives of others. Thus, if you use Opera, where
the current versions are derived from Google Chrome, it will show a
Chrome UA, but Opera detail at the end of the string.
Since the introduction of Advertise Firefox Compatibility, I've found it
very rare that sites complain about my use of Seamonkey, although
there's occasional exceptions. The archives of this newsgroup will show
several discussions over the last few years about issues with chase.com.
More recently, it's becoming more common for sites to complain about
Seamonkey, but it's not so much Seamonkey that they're complaining
about, but a UA string that shows a relatively old version of Firefox.
Seamonkey 2.49.3 is based on Firefox 52.x ESR, and there's a lot of
sites that don't know (or don't care) about the ESR version. Thus, more
sites that are insisting on reasonably current versions of Firefox,
typically 57.0 or newer. I don't do a lot with the ESR version, but a
user running an ESR release will probably get the same complaints about
an old browser.
2) Platform issues. For support purposes, I have a fairly extensive
collection of downloaded software, for both Windows and Mac. There's a
lot of developers that have the idea that if you're at their site
looking for downloads, you intend to install immediately. Thus, some
sites try to "help" by checking your User Agent string, and looking for
the platform information. If you're running a 32-bit version of
Windows, you'll get the 32-bit installer (and not the 64-bit version).
If you're running Mac, then you'll get the Mac installer.
In my case, I may want all of them, and so I sometimes have to resort to
spoofing to show the necessary platform. Thus, working from Windows,
I'll change the UA to show a browser that's running from a Mac (and it
really doesn't matter whether it's Seamonkey, Firefox, Chrome, Safari,
or anything, so long as it's communicating that the platform is a Mac).
Download the Mac version, then switch the UA back to the default.
3) I maintain a web page, and I do a measure of tracking of activity by
browser usage. Most web sites see some quantity of malicious access
attempts by bots, and it's common that bots show forged UA strings,
often versions that are really old, or invalid. I've seen a lot of
activity from a bot that shows "Firefox 40.1" (never valid), and I have
my site configured to reject connections if that's in the UA. When I
was setting up that particular filter, it was easy to spoof that in my
own browser, to ensure that the server was rejecting that particular
connection.
Smith
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