NFN Smith wrote:
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 think I recall seeing something relatively recently about one of the
newer versions of SeaMonkey changing the default UA string - or maybe I
imagined that! (An extra Firefox-only option was added in the
preferences dialog, so perhaps that's what I'm thinking of?) Anyway, if
the default UA string did change, that might have changed how Google
appears - as you've found, they return a different layout depending on
the UA string used.
It could also be that Google changed something on their site recently.
That could happen at any time, and is completely outside of SeaMonkey's
(or any other browser's) control. I don't often use Google at home, so
wouldn't have noticed when it changed.
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).
Previously, I'd also found the display better using a SeaMonkey-only UA
(with no mention of Firefox) - similar look to the SeaMonkey+Firefox UA
but without the broken alignment of the boxes etc. Trying just now,
though, it's not as bad as it used to be with a SeaMonkey+Firefox UA
either. I don't know whether that's down to changes in Google's coding
or the newer version of SeaMonkey.
A Firefox-only UA gives a completely different layout, similar to what
you get from Firefox itself.
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.
Indeed - it's Google serving a different layout depending what UA is
presented. It may be that they send more feature-rich content using
newer features to browsers they specifically recognise as being capable
of handling it, and a default less-capable version to unrecognised
browsers since they don't know whether they can handle the newer
features. Anyone wanting to know for sure would need to ask them.
Whatever the reason for them doing it, I don't think there's anything
SeaMonkey can do about it, other than sending a UA string claiming to be
Firefox.
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.
Yeah, with Google it does seem to be the combination of Firefox and
SeaMonkey that sometimes causes them problems. Either on its own seems
to be fine (though different layouts). My guess is that, with both in
the UA, they end up detecting Firefox in some places and sending the
Firefox version of some parts of the content/stylesheets/scripting and
the SeaMonkey version of other parts, and the mix of the two doesn't
work right.
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.
...and if anyone complains, tell them to use Chrome ;o)
--
Mark.
_______________________________________________
support-seamonkey mailing list
support-seamonkey@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
