David E. Ross wrote:
The link "Read More about Gecko" on the "Gecko is Gecko" page at
<http://geckoisgecko.org/> is a link to a Wikipedia article about Gecko,
which was updated less than two weeks ago. You can edit that Wikipedia
to eliminate obsolete information. The other links at "Gecko is Gecko"
-- "How to feature-sniff instead of browser-sniff" and "How to properly
sniff for a version of Gecko" -- are likely still relevant.
The page "User:Sardisson/Gecko is Gecko" at
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Sardisson/Gecko_is_Gecko> was last
updated a little over four years ago. As indicated by the URI, this is
a Mozilla wiki. You can obtain a logon to update this wiki.
I think you're missing my point. This is all good stuff.
However, for developers that are doing the wrong thing, of looking
explicitly for "Firefox", for the few that can be induced to go to
geckoisgecko, then if they see this particular page, where the majority
of content on the first page is EOL products, they're not going to
bother to dig further. In their view all this is, is a listing of a
bunch of "browsers you've never heard of", and because of the
misunderstanding of the difference between the Gecko rendering engine,
and Firefox as one implementation of Gecko (even if the most commonly
used), the listing of all the EOL products merely reinforces the idea
that the other browsers are unworthy of any attention at all, from the
developer.
What needs to be on the opening page an emphasis on the difference
between the rendering engine and the user interface, not the top-level
branding, and that this isn't a concept that's limited to Mozilla and
Firefox, but also to WebKit and Trident engines.
With Trident, that includes browsers such as Maxthon and Baidu. And
there's an impressive (and growing) number of browsers based on WebKit,
including Chromium, and Safari, and within Chromium, Blink (which
includes Google Chrome and Opera), as well as Epic and Comodo Dragon.
If a page renders correctly in Google Chrome, I'm not sure there's
anything that has to be done to it, to make it render correctly in
Safari or Opera or Epic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers
And I don't see any reason that the geckoisgecko page can't/shouldn't
use WebKit implementations as a concrete example of developing for the
engine, and not for the specifically-branded browser.
Look at some of the user agent strings that are currently in use:
IE 11: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko"
Opera 30: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.125 Safari/537.36 OPR/30.0.1835.88
Chrome 39: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36
PaleMoon 25.5.0: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.5) Gecko/20150607
Firefox/31.9 PaleMoon/25.5.0
Everybody is doing some measure of spoofing -- notice that each one of
these as "Mozilla/5.0" at the beginning of every string, including IE.
Whether we like it or not, the Firefox name is the de facto standard,
and Seamonkey is sufficiently a niche product that I think it's unlikely
that we can convince many developers to sniff for Gecko, rather than
Firefox. At that stage, the best thing to do is simply show a Firefox
string to servers, and note that it's Firefox that is being shown by an
implementation of Seamonkey. For the most part, that should get
Seamonkey users what they need. Yes, there will be brain-dead
developers that insist on coding according to their misconceptions, and
rejecting anything that's not explicitly and exclusively Firefox. For
me, I can live with that, by using PrefsBar to spoof Firefox, if it
doesn't force me to launch Chrome or IE to get to the site.
Smith
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