Contest for the most stupid user agent string

After Camino and Seamonkey, Epiphany is joining the let's have a dumb UA club.

Instead of actually fixing the problem at its root by forcing stupid people not to try to match Firefox, by totally removing Firefox in Firefox's UA, which would definitely have had a good result, they go the opposite direction.

If I see that crap coming in Debian in either epiphany, galeon or kazehakase, or any other browser based on libxul, I promise I'll hack the thing that puts the user-agent together so that it suppresses all occurrences of Firefox from it.

If only people at mozilla were as thoughtful as Robert Kaiser...

2007-07-04 22:11:03+0900

xulrunner

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2 Responses to “Contest for the most stupid user agent string”

  1. Sam Morris Says:

    Please, respect upstream’s choice of user-agent string; it was made with their users in mind–and hence ours. No one will benefit if we revert upstream’s choice in this matter.

    End users will lose out because lots of popular and exciting javascript-heavy sites will fail to work on their computer. They will do one of four things:

    * Suffer in silence, live in misery.
    * Complain to upstream. This makes upstream hate us.
    * Abandon the browser. This makes upstream hate us.
    * Abandon Debian altogether, because Debian ships broken software.

    Upstream will lose out because they will be inundated with support requests from these users, saying that upstream’s browser is broken. But the browser is only broken because of Debian’s unilateral decision to break it! Upstreams find this particularly frustrating because they are totally powerless to change what we do; their only recourse is to badmouth Debian (rightly so!) and tell their users to switch to a different, non-broken operating system.

    Debian maintainers and Mozilla should be working together to improve their relationship, but I fear that every change such as this makes it more likely that Mozilla will become another Joerg Schilling or Tuomo Valkonen.

  2. Tyln Sylverwind Says:

    Time for a “Firefox is not my browser” UA?

    It’s nice to see that the Firefox team is sticking with tradition. After all, it would be such a shame if the Gecko version were ever to replace the Mozilla string.

    Personally, I see something more to the akin in my near future:

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070508 Iceweasel/2.0.0.4 (Debian-2.0.0.4-1; F*** Firefox/2.0) (India; Papa; Victor; 6)

    A few little words never hurt anyone, no?