Re: Debian, Iceweasle, Firefox!

[Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca>]

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 29, 2007 at 07:01:30PM -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
>> Paul Johnson wrote:
>> > I would argue that if the value of your User-Agent string affects
>> > browsing habits, then the bug is with the website, not the browser.
>> 
>>     This is a battle you, and anyone else who thinks like you, is going
>>     to
>> lose.  Opera has had user agent munging for it's entire existence
>> precisely
>> because of these bugs in the website.  That's 10 years and counting.  It
>> also isn't just some rinky-dink sites that exclude based on the user
>> string. Banks, large news sites, places people generally want to visit on
>> a daily
>> basis do so.  Quite frankly Firefox is lucky to often be on the inside of
>> that blockade.
> 
> the state of washington, which has really good online stuff, bombs on
> the iceweasel string. Specifically the "payment voucher" (which is
> from their perspective one of the most important things to get right)
> from the sales tax reporting website gets all munched when it sees the
> iceweasel user-agent string. I emailed them about it (they are
> fantastic by the way and really happy to hear that there are other
> OSes using their site. they even have both a "linux" and "other"
> option for the OS when filing tech support emails through the webpage)
> and that was indeed the issue -- unrecognised user-agent string. Now,
> why they would put a very simple, text only, page into a setup that
> depends on user-agent string is beyond me, but... there it is.

That's funny, too.  Might want to dig deeper on that one, I know Oregon, and
I could have sworn Washington, considers browser bias to be in violation of
Americans with Disabilities Act, since you can't reasonably expect a blind
person to use a GUI web browser.