One more possible cause of SM problems on sites

User Help for Seamonkey and Mozilla Suite
Post Reply
alexyu
Posts: 28
Joined: October 31st, 2007, 10:07 am

One more possible cause of SM problems on sites

Post by alexyu »

A new (to me, at least) possible cause of SM problems on sites, fortunately quickly corrected in this case.

I had used the "CD Universe" site off and on for many years, and since 2020 they made many changes which helped me visit the site, and buy CD/DVDs by mail order -- but, last week, I suddenly couldn't log in to my account: Clicking the "Login" button didn't do anything, and changing the UA, or blocking JavaScript, didn't help.

Using FireFox or MS Edge, though, I could login normally, so I contacted their support, which responded quickly and attentively and, after I explained, the support rep downloaded a copy of the SM version I described (so, it was not something they usually handled), and discovered what was going on. In his words:

"I was able to recreate the issue. A lot of links were no longer clickable, and the reason was that we were incorrectly recognizing that browser as a search engine trying to catalog our pages. I've fixed this problem so the website should now function normally."

And, lo and behold, he was right: I immediately was able to login in SM! I've heard and seen many horror stories of site devs' unhelpful attitudes, so it's pleasant to relate a quick and positive one.

Besides, I had never heard of SM having problems on a site for this reason (it was mistaken for a web spider/bot, which shows how it's so little known nowadays), so I also thought others might be interested in this story.
v_v
Posts: 157
Joined: September 18th, 2021, 8:57 am

Re: One more possible cause of SM problems on sites

Post by v_v »

Thank you alexyu for the report. To me this sort of thing is probably why many web sites have problems with SeaMonkey (SM): they simply do not recognize it because it is not one of the "major" or "popular" browsers. So the web site(s) mis-identify and/or mis-cateorize it and then SM will not work correctly on their site. As some members have said this is not so much a SM problem as it is a web site problem. To cut down on their work web site programmers simply set things up for the so-called major and popular browsers. SM is not the only browser with this sort of problem as I have also experienced this with the new Opera. Even though Opera is fairly well known and has the latest Chromium updates, it is still not Chrome or Chromium proper and some web sites just simply will not recognize it.

Maybe their should be some universal browser identification standard that all browsers needed to adhere to, and therefore programmers could just set their sites up for that standard. I don't know.

v_v
alexyu
Posts: 28
Joined: October 31st, 2007, 10:07 am

Re: One more possible cause of SM problems on sites

Post by alexyu »

If that happened, how would we spoof UAs, then?
It's a 'catch-22', IMHO...
HyperSnugz
Posts: 2
Joined: January 22nd, 2022, 3:16 pm
Location: Planeptune
Contact:

Re: One more possible cause of SM problems on sites

Post by HyperSnugz »

as I have also experienced this with the new Opera.
Shame Opera is a Chinese botnet now, but to hear that web 'developers' are literally checking for exact-matching strings is actually terrifying when most browsers are running the same engine...
Maybe their should be some universal browser identification standard that all browsers needed to adhere to, and therefore programmers could just set their sites up for that standard. I don't know.
Wasn't that the very idea of browser standards in the first place, as well as things like feature detection? And then here comes the evil that are things like WebComponents - and bad web developers simply going 'if it isn't the latest Chrome, serve a polyfill that was only tested on Chrome'...
Last edited by DanRaisch on February 7th, 2022, 4:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Minor edit for language.
trevoz
Posts: 71
Joined: December 12th, 2005, 9:40 pm

Re: One more possible cause of SM problems on sites

Post by trevoz »

On the other hand, SeaMonkey allows me to bypass some newspapers' paywalls probably for a similar reason :-)
User avatar
Peter Creasey
Posts: 1340
Joined: October 26th, 2007, 2:32 pm
Location: Texas

Re: One more possible cause of SM problems on sites

Post by Peter Creasey »

I've always been and still am a huge fan and user of SeaMonkey; however, there is NO advantage that I've ever experienced as a SM user when visiting any sites...only too frequent web page launch failures. msn.com again today after I thought I cured that problem.
. . . . . . . . . . Pete
trevoz
Posts: 71
Joined: December 12th, 2005, 9:40 pm

Re: One more possible cause of SM problems on sites

Post by trevoz »

Peter Creasey wrote:I've always been and still am a huge fan and user of SeaMonkey; however, there is NO advantage that I've ever experienced as a SM user when visiting any sites..
Possibly because of your UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

cf mine below :)
Post Reply