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Re: what's your favourite FLOSS?



On Tuesday 10 November 2009 10:46:50 Wolodja Wentland wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 17:29 +0100, Sjoerd Hardeman wrote:
> > comply with recommendations, you can use the User Agent plugin
> >  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
> > to have Iceweasel report a different User-Agent string.
>
> Which is a solution for some people, but a a lot of users don't
> care about User Agents or might not even know about Iceweasel plugins.
>
> I would welcome a new default UA that enables non tech savvy user to use
> Iceweasel on Debian in the same way they used Firefox on Windows. Let's
> not alienate these people by making it harder for them than it is
> already.

Debian has two choices:  1. Use the same user-agent as Firefox.  2. Use a 
different user-agent from Firefox.

The first is a non-option.  Iceweasel does not follow Mozilla's trademark 
usage guidelines.  If it uses the Firefox trademark and Debian distributes it, 
Debian could be sued into non-existence.

The second results is "false negatives" from websites that use the user-agent 
to determine your browser's features.  (This has been recommended against for 
as long as there have been user-agent strings.)  Iceweasel has all the 
features the website requires, but the website still degrades your experience 
or refuses to operate at all.

There are a number of ways individual users can affect their user-agent 
string, if they so desire.  On the rare occasions I use IceWeasel, (I prefer 
Konqueror) I proudly identify as Iceweasel and not Firefox.
-- 
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