Forum: Weblog comments

If they do this mostly for some high-profile sites, why don't they include an updatable list of sites (like the phishing list) to which it should serve that UA?

Geez!
Too bad it's not defined strictly (are the parenthesesed values not defined anywhere?), else I'd say f*** those sites, and change the UA to a good one everywhere. :/

Opera decided to clean up their act with Opera 9 and use a very straightforward user string:

Opera/9.21 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X; U; en)

Firefox has many times the marketshare of Opera and should opt to ditch the legacy parts of the UA. Any fallout could be handled by a temporary internal whitelist of important domains to use a legacy string with, which can be followed up by the Mozilla evangelist team helping those important sites to fix their code.

I think you guys should sanitize the string and just use SeaMonkey as the user agent (and optionally include Gecko in it), a la Opera. As a SeaMonkey user, I'm blocked out of sites that require Internet Explorer or Firefox. The problem is that I'm on Linux and Firefox annoys me (so I just go away; I've never actually encountered a site I wanted to get in so bad that I'd use another browser to get in). But I disagree with UA detection on principle. I think, in most cases, detecting UAs rather than features is a sign of poor implementation and of short-sightedness.

Keith,
there is a point in that, but the string is currently used to identify the build when commenting in Bugzilla, and it is detected and filled in automatically in some places like that. So the language and platform probably have to stay.

GMX and Web.de (Webmail) both belonging to united internet checking for Firefox and advertising for the new version, not detecting my Seamonkey.

Even worse, GMX ist running it's Beta testing for GMX 2007 which is only offered if Firefox is in the UA string. Sometime in the future it will be default - leaving all others behind. Of corse one of the biggest Webmailer in germany don't need a support email, on the support page you end up in the FAQ.

Sanitizing should be a good thing, if Ff and other projects go along with it. Otherwise none will care. Build in an additional button for sending the suggested long UA string - of course with Kitchensink/1.0

No, let mozilla just straighten up there Ustring and let those damn website fix thair own mess, - if i find an important website that my browser doesn't work with, first thin i do is a w3c check on the site, IF it doesn't not compy, i got a nice mailer demon install, set to pust some 10 complaint mails to, abuse@domain.com && webmaster@domain.com && info@domain.com && sales@domain.com etc. and i think we should all engage into such practice, THAT is the only way to 'as webusers' enforce 'important public' websites to designe by the rules,

i for one would always send a open letter to the media if i found out that mygovernment.<com> was un-readable by alternative browers (other than IE i mean)

You've forgot to replace "U;" with "U [like I];" for those sites which prefer weak security

The rendering engine is usually the important piece of information, so how about:

Gecko/XX (Windows; en-UK) Firefox/YY
Gecko/XX (Windows; en-UK) Seamonkey/YY
AppleWebKit/XX (Mac OS X; de) Safari/YY
KHTML/XX (Linux; fr) Konqueror/YY

You'd probably still want the closed source browsers to start with the browser name though, which is a bit inconsistent:
MSIE/XX (Linux; en-UK)
Opera/XX (Windows; en-UK)