Considering the AMO override is in place, I can probably "up" the firefox compat version number to something more applicable to Pale Moon's level of compatibility, hopefully avoiding
some of the issues with sites complaining "browser too old, outdated firefox, upgrade now!!!" although many will insist everyone keeps on the "latest" version "at all times" where it wouldn't help.
I do, however, stress once more that
simply pretending to be a specific different browser is a bad idea. It has its own set of attached issues, not in the least the sites assuming a browser has an exact match of x and y features that Pale Moon might not have. I do understand the practical implications of not doing this, as well, and how potential Pale Moon users might think it's just "not worth it" to fiddle with workarounds. But that once again is a matter of impatience and the status quo where websites using UA sniffing (and there
really is
no reason to do this in 2014 anymore) will just be given exactly what they want and will never change their bad practices.
I'm using pre-configured workarounds for sites that have indicated simply never to want to support Pale Moon
, and will put in temporaries for some major sites that are "pending" corporate office responses (like Netflix and Google), but the main, default, setting for Pale Moon should remain the request for sites to do something about this problem, not for Pale Moon to just "satisfy" whatever arbitrary demands there are -- and in turn supporting UA sniffing by matching the script instead of the script matching the browsers (as it is supposed to do).
See also the following quote (from 2011):
The biggest problem with UA sniffing is the “UA” part, because browsers lie. A lot. They started lying with the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0, and they continue to lie to this very day. Browsers lie about who they are and what they can do all the time. Sometimes it’s not even the browsers themselves who do the lying, but proxies adjusting UserAgent strings along the way without the browser’s or the user’s knowledge.
In the past few years, more often than not the lying isn’t intentional, but that makes no difference to a website doing UA sniffing. It’s especially noticeable when new browsers show up on the scene, based on an open-source rendering engine that’s been around for a while. While egregious inconsistencies between the browser’s claims of supported features and the reality of those claims are often quickly fixed in subsequent updates, UA sniffing strings are updated far less frequently.
Source:
http://farukat.es/journal/2011/02/499-l ... r-sniffing
Another thing to consider is that a default override will also prevent those very problematic sites from seeing the amount of traffic from Pale Moon clients (it'll be counted towards whatever is faked) and if that result in "insignificant traffic" from this client, the sites will simply not do anything about it (because it's not worth their time).
Does this clarify the status quo and the inherent dilemma with "just faking the UA"?