As someone pointed out in the thread, Mozilla doesn't even allow its trunk and alpha versions of Firefox to use the Firefox brand, whether in application name, installation directory (for the Windows version) or user agent. Third party builds (even if they just add a compiler flag) of final releases aren't allowed to use the Firefox brand either. I think we're just as not allowed to distribute versions of Firefox that use the Firefox user agent as we're not allowed to distribute versions that use the Firefox name and logo.
As also explained, user agent switcher fixes the issue trivially. And you may want to add Google Wave to the list of webapps which complain about the Iceweasel user agent :) On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 5:12 PM, John Goerzen <jgoer...@complete.org> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > The fact that Iceweasel does not behave like Firefox in some important > areas has been bothering me more and more of late. Iceweasel breaks > many, many web apps by virtue of not using the Firefox user-agent > string. It also breaks compatibility with some plugins. > > I completely agree with why we have named it Iceweasel, but I disagree > with breaking API compatibility with Firefox. > > On http://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel, we claim that it will be basically > identical to Firefox. The linked announcement [1] also claims that. > > Here are some sites/apps that break, at least in part, because of our > API claiming to be Iceweasel: > > Zimbra admin console > BlackBoard (used by thousands of universities) > http://browserplus.yahoo.com/ (claims the browser isn't supported) > http://gears.google.com/ (claims browser isn't supported) > hundreds of banks > The conferencing app at dimdim.com > Kerio mail server > > I know there may be technical arguments that "people shouldn't be using > user agent like that." But the reality is that they are, and we have a > serious usability problem because we change user agent. There's no > reason that we'd have to change user agent just because we change the > name it presents to us. > > I have a colleague that refuses to run Debian's Iceweasel. I have > another that is working on groupware evaluation and is having trouble > because many of the web apps don't correctly recognize Iceweasel as > Firefox. > > It would be *great* if this could be fixed before sarge comes out. > > [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/10/msg00665.html > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > listmas...@lists.debian.org > >
