1505460 - SeaMonkey general.useragent.override.github.com for GitHub

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Graham Perrin]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4 Lightning/5.4

At GitHub: 

> Please note that GitHub no longer supports old versions of Firefox.
> We recommend upgrading to the latest Safari, Google Chrome, or Firefox.

Non-working features include the Edit menu option for a comment.

Workaround: 

general.useragent.override.github.com

Re: <https://github.com/MrAlex94/Waterfox/pull/784> the following value seems to be good for Waterfox: 

Mozilla/5.0 (rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0

For SeaMonkey, something else might be appropriate. 

Thanks

Comment 1

[Frank-Rainer Grahl (:frg)]

Personally I dislike adding user agents to the prefs. I rather tend to avoid sites and services which act like github. Glad that I use gitlab :)

But we need to at least mention it in the release notes. Same with google.

FRG

Comment 2

[bblack]

I think that works correctly.

This user agent works: 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 SeaMonkey/2.53


This user agent don't work: 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0 SeaMonkey/2.53

Only if activated in the settings "Advertise Firefox compatibility" there is this problem.

Firefox/56.0 is an old version.
SeaMonkey/2.53 is not an old version.

So both are displayed correctly.

Comment 3

[bblack]

We may be able to increase the Firefox compatibility to a more recent value if the security patches of a later version have been integrated.

That is not completely correct, but not entirely wrong.

Comment 4

[Dmitry Butskoy]

(In reply to Graham Perrin from comment #0)

At GitHub:

Please note that GitHub no longer supports old versions of Firefox.
We recommend upgrading to the latest Safari, Google Chrome, or Firefox.

Non-working features include the Edit menu option for a comment.

Workaround:

general.useragent.override.github.com

Mozilla/5.0 (rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0

For SeaMonkey, something else might be appropriate.

bug #1242294 introduces "general.useragent.compatMode.firefox-exact", which drops all but Firefox/60 from UA string.

IOW, if user chooses this setting to be on, there is no need to site-specific override (until github will require FF/68 etc. :) )

The User-Agent string, being initially an application id, gradually evolved into "browser class" to which the application belongs.
Thus Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi belong to "Chrome class""; Firefox, Waterfox, Palemoon, SeaMonkey belongs to "Firefox class".
Certainly it is still not documented anywhere, and still even accompanied by various OS info, but it is de facto no longer an application id.

Personally, after I set common "general.useragent.override" to UA string just matching the correspond Firefox version (several years ago), I never see any issues with most common sites. The presence of SM in UA string says nothing useful for all the sites (except seamonkey addon site), just confuses some of them (github, google), and probably causes security stuffs to track your activity, since you use "strange/broken/hackish" software to access them.