no...@nonospam.org wrote:
For the last couple of months, the appearance of the main Google website on SeaMonkey has been different from what it has been for years. Search results are presented in individual boxes, and the website just looks strange.
I haven't seen any changes recently, but I rarely go to google.com, and I also normally leave the scripting for google.com inactive (via NoScript) unless I encounter something that requires it (most often, other sites that offer search and use Google's searching).
That said, I've found that at www.google.com, if using a standard Seamonkey User Agent display, the search bar's display is a little odd, where cursor and text is displayed about half a line offset above where it should be. I found that that goes away if I show a stock Firefox UA string (rather than Seamonkey's UA of Firefox with Seamonkey's ID tagged at the end).
Even though I'm a fan of changing UA with PrefBar, I've found that this is one site (among several) where I'd rather not have to remember to change the UA when I visit, then remember to change back when I'm done, because UA spoofing also changes the User-Agent header in mail. (I notice that your message shows Firefox 86, rather than Seamonkey). Thus, for this one, I prefer to do permanent site-specific spoofing, and in about:config, I have a line in prefs.js that sets general.useragent.override.google.com to show:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0
This is another example of a website which works differently with SeaMonkey than it does with Firefox. Changing the user agent string is a workaround, but why should this be required?
It's something specific to Google, and why they do it isn't obvious. I've heard indications of issues at YouTube that require similar spoofing. I haven't seen that myself, but I don't do a lot at YouTube.
Although my observation is that a Firefox UA string that includes additional text (which is normal for browsers that are derived from Firefox but not actually Firefox, such as Seamonkey, PaleMoon and Waterfox) seems to confuse Google, I haven't actually tested either PaleMoon or Waterfox.
In the grand scheme of things, I think it's one of those places where the number of people running Firefox browsers is small enough (the function equivalent of a rounding error), that Google doesn't really care, one way or another. They'll do the necessary work to make Firefox behave correctly, and if it's not Firefox, not worth the effort.
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