Richmond wrote:
Is there a way to make pref-bar default to a Firefox user agent string?
I have tried putting this as the init-function:
js:useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/52.0"
But it doesn't seem to be working. What I want it to do is start with a
Firefox UA rather than start with Real UA and then I have to change it.
(Testing by restarting the browser and visiting google search.) Google
has clearly lost the plot on agent sniffing. I am going to call it Goofy
from now on.
I've used PrefBar for years, but never encountered that particular
issue, although I can't recall explicitly wanting to start the browser
with spoofing active.
I just ran a couple of checks on my own copy -- I set Seamonkey to show
another UA, and the restarted, and after the restart, it was still
showing the selected agent, and I don't have any code in the init-function.
What's happening is that Google is mishandling display, because the
Seamonkey designation comes after Firefox. I've seen suggestions about
reversing the order by putting Seamonkey before Firefox, but when I
tried that, I still get the funky display at Google. Looks like they're
mishandling anything that looks like that.
Just for fun, I decided to see how they handle PaleMoon. I started first
in PaleMoon, and I got the correct display. Then I put the PaleMoon UA
into a PrefBar button, and when I went to Google, I got the same
(correct) display. The string that I'm using is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:60.9) Gecko/20100101
Goanna/4.1 Firefox/60.9 PaleMoon/28.2.2
I haven't tested further to see what variants can be made to convince
Google to give me the correct display.
If it's just Google that's giving you this kind of problem, I suggest a
different approach. Instead of spoofing via PrefBar, go to about:config,
and add one entry:
general.useragent.override.google.com
and then set the UA to whatever you want to be showing google. If you
do it that way, then you're spoofing only for Google, and then showing
your normal UA to everybody else.
Normally, I don't like permanent spoofing via about:config, because as
often as possible, I want to be showing the normal Seamonkey UA, but
doing that for a specific domain is definitely appropriate.
One other consideration that is Seamonkey-specific: when you're doing
spoofing, that affects not just the browser, but your mail client, as
well. Although not a lot of attention is paid to User-Agent: headers in
email, they're not insignificant, either. I happen to use the Display
Mail User Agent extension, and for the message I'm replying to, you had
spoofing active, and as a result, the extension was showing an orange
Firefox logo, rather than expected blue Seamonkey logo.
There may be occasions where browser spoofing could cause problems for
mail handling. When I was running a mail server, I made some amount of
checking of User-Agent: headers, where the server would reject mail from
clients that didn't show an acceptable version. The primary intent of
this one was to force our users to use reasonably current versions of
clients (especially with updated security fixes), but I found that it
also did some useful work as a spam filter, as some spammers are
lazy/sloppy, and will show User-Agent: headers that are really old or
versions that were never valid. (I do the same kind of work on the web
server I maintain, where I reject traffic from connections that show old
or invalid browser UAs). It's unlikely, but you could bump into this
kind of filtering, where messages you send could be rejected because a
legitimate email message should not be showing that it's Firefox.
If it's just Google that's giving you problems with Seamonkey, I think
you're better off with using about:config to spoof just your connections
to Google, and where you use PrefBar spoofing only at the times when you
need it.
Smith
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