Listing compatible browsers in user-agent

Diego SANTA CRUZ <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.galeon.devel
Organization Ecole Polytechnique F??d??rale de Lausanne - EPFL
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi there,

Sorry if this has already been proposed, but I think it would be useful
to list compatible browsers in the user agent string (maybe as an
option), such as netscape. I know that it is possible to change the user
agent string through gconf, but I don't want to spoof the user agent,
just provide a way to browse broken sites that check user agent for
major browser names.

For example, IOmega's support page
(http://www.iomega.com/europe/support/english/index.html) tests for
browser compatibility using the following javascript code:

var isNS4 = (document.layers) ? true : false;
var isIE4plus = (document.all) ? true : false;
var isNS6 = (!document.layers) &&
	(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Netscape')!=-1) ? true : false;

So, since galeon's default user agent is like

Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020830

there will be no match, and the site does not work. I worked around this
by setting the user agent to

Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020830
(compatible; Netscape/7.0;)

So listing netscape/7 in the user agent enables galeon to browse such
sites. Maybe the user agent string above is totally broken or not
desirable (I know next to nothing of what suitable user agents have to
look like), but something along the lines of it would probably do it.

Does this sound something desirable?

Best,

Diego

PS: I'm not on galeon-devel list.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
Diego Santa Cruz
PhD. student
Publications available at http://ltswww.epfl.ch/~dsanta
Signal Processing Institute (LTS1 / ITS / STI)
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
EPFL - STI - ITS, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
E-mail:     [email protected]
Phone:      +41 - 21 - 693 26 57
Fax:        +41 - 21 - 693 76 00
-------------------------------------------------------



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