Chuck wrote:
I have been using Seamonkey for years now mainly for email and
browsing. I know there a many things in Seamonkey I don't have a clue
about but since I never use them,
I have not needed to understand them. However one thing I would like
to understand (and don't) is "spoofing", or whatever the proper term
is.
I just had to go to Firefox to do my taxes because Turbotax would not
run in Seamonkey.
Is there a source which I could access to learn to use this feature
in Seamonkey.
Remember I am a just a basic user of Seamonkey
Thanks, Chuck
"spoofing" is indeed the term you want to use.
There's more than one way to go about this, and which you use depends on
what you're doing, and what level of tinkering that you're comfortable with.
To start off, looking at your posted message, your copy of Seamonkey is
currently reporting itself as:
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
SeaMonkey/2.49.5
It's a good bet that Intuit isn't really complaining about Seamonkey
specifically, so much as they are about a browser identifying itself as
Firefox 52. It's likely that you could get what you need if you are
using the UA string for Seamonkey 2.53.1:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
SeaMonkey/2.53.1
You can spoof this from 2.49.5, but I would suggest that you probably
want to upgrade to 2.53.1.
Although I don't think they're objecting to Seamonkey, if they are, you
could simply spoof Firefox 60, without mentioning Seamonkey. If you're
running 2.53.1, then the easiest way to get that is going to be to turn
off the "Advertise Firefox Compatibility" setting, which would cause
Seamonkey to show:
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
For that, go Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> HTTP Networking, and
then un-tick the User Agent String for Firefox.
I'm betting that the combination of updating to 2.53.1 and that setting
will be the easiest for you.
You can also do spoofing either by extension or by going to about:config
to tweak your prefs.js file. With the extension route, the way to do
that is to get PrefBar from https://prefbar.tuxfamily.org/ although once
it's installed, you have to make sure that the UserAgent control is
shown, as well as to make sure you have added a setting to show one of
the strings noted above. There's a number of strings already there,
that are useful as examples, but they're all really old.
Personally, I do PrefBar, because it allows me to do spoofing changes on
the fly, where I can show what I want, when I want, and then go back to
showing the default, when spoofing is no longer needed.
The other approach is via about:config, and adding one or more entries
there.
If you have an entry called general.useragent.override and set a UA
string there (i.e., one of the ones noted above), then that permanently
sets the UA for all activity (including what is included in outbound
email). Because of the email angle, I generally discourage this one,
because it makes your email look like it was sent by Firefox (which is
not a mail client). Few will probably notice or care, but it does stand
out as being unusual.
You can also do site-specific spoofing by extended versions of
general.useragent.override, where you add the server and domain name you
need. Thus, for you, you probably want
general.useragent.override.turbotax.intiut.com and again, using one of
the strings noted above.
Even though I generally prefer to do spoofing on the fly, there are a
couple of sites that I visit regularly, where I do use site-specific
general.useragent.override entries. One is with google.com, where I
show a straight Firefox UA, because for some reason, Google doesn't
display quite correctly if it sees a Firefox string that includes
Seamonkey, particularly in that the cursor location in Google's search
bar doesn't display correctly. A minor annoyance, but nice to know that
I can fix the display. I also currently spoof 2.53.1 for a couple of
financial institutions. I just upgraded Seamonkey from 2.49.5 yesterday,
and those sites have been complaining about unsupported browser, and by
showing a 2.53 string with Firefox, spoofing makes those complaints go
away. Now that I'm upgraded to 2.53, I don't need to spoof anymore,
although eventually I'll remove those, especially when I eventually see
newer versions of Seamonkey.
To re-iterate, I think the easiest approach for you is upgrading to
2.53, and then turning off advertising Firefox compatibility. If, for
some reason, you don't want to upgrade, then the next easiest solution
is using about:config to spoof just when you're visiting
turbotax.intuit.com.
Smith
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