Daniel wrote:
https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/system-requirements
According to this, it's not just browser support, they don't support
linux at all.
Android is based on Linux, isn't it??
And what difference would it make what OS you are using to run your
preferred Browser which would then be sending a series of 'Ones' and
'nones' from your modem to their modem??
If all the interface is browser-based, then it really doesn't matter
what the underlying platform is. I do find it interesting that the site
indicates that Windows 7 is OK, as is Mac all the way back to Mavericks.
Plus that Opera is on the list of acceptable browsers.
Something that I've noticed with sites that demand only certain browsers
(and levels) is that what they're communicating usually doesn't match
with the reality of interacting with their sites. Years ago, for sites
that demanded *only* Internet Explorer, that made sense, as that was
generally an indication that the site used ActiveX scripting, but that's
not happening anymore.
If a site specifies that you *must* be running Chrome, Firefox, Safari
or Edge, it's frequently a matter of what the site's tech support people
are willing to interact with, especially with UI navigation to specific
settings. If they say "Firefox", they want to be able to tell you to go
to Tools -> Options -> [whatever setting] and tell you to click X and Y,
and be done with it. For them, it doesn't matter that Seamonkey is also
a Gecko browser with all the same capacities, if the navigation to get
to those settings is unfamiliar: Edit -> Preferences -> and an entirely
different menu of options. In that sense, those of us that run
Seamonkey are at more of a disadvantage than users of Palemoon and
Waterfox, because the others have config UIs that are much closer to
current versions of Firefox. I've found this effect most common with
financial institutions.
I know that there are sites that do demand at least Firefox 60, but I'm
not aware of anything out there that actually requires stuff that is
unique to Gecko 60. Maybe there's a few out there that expect you to
install a WebExtensions add-on, but I haven't seen any. That's the only
reason I can think of for a technical reason to require Firefox 60.
The other thing on demanding particular browsers and versions (and O/S
levels) is that there is something to be said for ensuring minimum
versions that have some measure of currency of security patches. On my
own site, I do block access to Firefox versions older than 52, as well
as blocking access to Windows versions older than Win 7 and Mac versions
older than Sierra. Part of it is that I want to discourage people from
running really old stuff that's no longer being maintained. However, in
a similar way, I've found that the bulk of traffic that hits my site
that purports to be from older systems is mostly bot traffic that I
don't want at my site anyway. For that, I don't bother with
script-based sniffing to deliver a warning message. Instead, I go the
route of using regular expressions in the .htaccess file, and if a UA
string shows a Firefox version older than 50 or that it's running
Windows XP, I just drop the connection.
On this, I will note that my site does get some volume of traffic that
claims to be running Firefox 40.1 (a version that was never valid), and
dropping those connections immediately is a zero-loss proposition, plus
less bandwidth wasted, and cleaner access statistics.
Circling back to Seamonkey, my experience is that nearly all the time,
if a site demands certain params for browser and O/S, if your browser UA
string shows something that's acceptable to them, you shouldn't have
problems interacting, regardless of what browser and O/S combination
that you're actively using.
Smith
_______________________________________________
support-seamonkey mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
