Kirya [.net]

1 | Hamish Moffatt

June 24th, 2007 at 3:35 pm

I’ve found that most sites check for Firefox and you can put whatever else you like.. so in Iceweasel I change it to say “Iceweasel Firefox” or something daft. You can edit this through about:config, no need for Extensions.

2 | Julien

June 24th, 2007 at 5:55 pm

Thanks, I didn’t know I could change this so easily!

The exact key name is general.useragent.extra.firefox

3 | Kevin Mark

June 25th, 2007 at 5:00 am

It just shows they (the website makers) are so cooky that they just expect IE and no one else. Then we say ‘what about firefox’ and so they add ‘firefox’. They we say ‘about iceweasle or opera or safari?’. All this work just to avoid making a standards-compliant web experiece in the first place.

4 | Evgeni Golov

June 25th, 2007 at 6:53 pm

The problem with “Gecko” is - how do you know which Gecko it is? An old Mozilla build from 2002 also identifies as Gecko… And I bet it will render the page in a different way
And no, you cannot parse the stamp behind the slash: Gecko/20070508 (that’s what my Iceweasel claims to be) - it’s just the build date, not the release date, so a today build Firefox 1.0 will have 20070625
The only way is to change Iceweasel to Firefox or “Firefox Iceweasel” (here google maps fails, but it works with plain Icewesel *grml) - as you already find out.

5 | Julien

June 25th, 2007 at 7:24 pm

You are right, but who’s running this 2002 Mozilla release now? If someone is, he should be used to reading strange things!

I guess no browser detection should be done, as this is only overhead for people using standard compliant browsers. Web developers could also make their sites degrade gracefully with older browsers not supporting recent standards.

As for Google Maps, I can’t see anything preventing me to use “Firefox Iceweasel” or even simply “Iceweasel”, where have you seen this?