Change in approach for Pale Moon web identification

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Moonchild
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Change in approach for Pale Moon web identification

Unread post by Moonchild » 2014-10-21, 13:20

One of the impacting changes in v25.0 of Pale Moon has been the removal of the "Firefox" portion from Pale Moon's user agent.

Although this is generally considered in the developer and power user circles to be the right thing to do, because of the inherent problems attached to "lying about which browser you are", the problem of websites not using current-day capabilities detection methods and falling for "assuming capabilities based on an arbitrary ID string" is more widespread than anticipated. This includes big sites like Google, Apple's iCloud, Netflix, internal company sites, banking sites and even embedded web administration pages in routers :!:

This is one of the points where the interests of the general audience and the desired direction of software developers clash - and I will personally continue to work in the intended mode (non-compatible) with a small handful of workarounds on a domain-by-domain basis for the few problematic sites I visit, but will change the approach for a default installation of Pale Moon to include the "Firefox Compatibility" mode flag as enabled again (with a simple checkbox in Options to switch it off and on).

Despite the desired development direction, the inconvenience caused for users is simply too great as well as the resistance of websites contacted, who, despite using 21st century web design techniques and layouts for display, are apparently not willing to abandon old, limited and often incorrect detection methods. Maybe another few years down the road this can be attempted again, hoping for progress in the area of website development, but for now: the users have spoken, and Pale Moon has listened.
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