[gentoo-user] Re: user agent switcher - automatic

[Mick <michaelkintzios@lycos.co.uk>]

Harm Geerts wrote:

> On Monday 13 February 2006 20:56, Joseph wrote:
>> I remember there was some kind of user agent for Mozilla (before
>> firefox) that worked per url basis.
>>
>> Anyhow, the current user agent doesn't help me.  I can seem to fool
>> Canada Post web-loging screen with Firefox - user agent (it display
>> log-in screen) but when I try to create an account it'll not the spoof.
>> Can anybody try it:
>> http://www.canadapost.ca/business/obc/default-e.asp?sblid=obc
>> There is a link on the right: "New user... click here"
> 
> As soon as the login page finishes loading I get redirected to a 404 page,
> I don't even get the chance to do anything...
> 
> You really should send an email to them about it and let them know they're
> missing (give or take) 10% of potential customers by filtering
> firefox/gecko browsers.
> 
> With the browser requirements they have I'll never be able to register...
> Their world stops with IE and netscape, IE obviously doesn't run native on
> linux, and netscape is masked for amd64.
> 
> webdevelopment, it's a dirty business :-)

Their server sends a test cookie which discriminates against decent
browsers!  Firefox won't play.  Opera falls apart irrespective of how I set
it to identify itself.  The same happens with Konqueror in the default user
agent setting, but it logs in happily in the IE6 setting.  Some bright
spark has written 311 lines of code in a script which actively
discriminates against most browsers & OS's out there.

Some web-developers or businesses are concerned that they provide an
identical web presence to all visitors for marketing/corporate identity
purposes.  A deformed/malfunctioning website is understandably not
acceptable for them.  Lazy wysiwyg web designers will not spend time to
trim their code for most browsers to be able to show their content as
intended.  On the other hand one can end up chasing their tail if every
browser invented has to show the same content.  There's bound to be some
differences.

I understand that Google now discriminates against websites which . . .
discriminate against particular browsers.  IE and their wysiwyg HTML
editing products have cause a lot of bad code out there and it will take
some time to people to catch up and clean their code.  Until then COMPLAIN!
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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