Bug#484121: tasksel: let's sync on the GNOME task

[Eric Dorland]

* Joey Hess (joeyh at debian.org) wrote:
> Eric Dorland wrote:
> > Well I think Google generally does treat the Iceweasel user agent
> > properly.
> 
> Not in the case of maps.google.com, where the sidebar cannot be hidden
> in iceweasel, can in firefox.
> 
> > > I'm afraid that documenting it in README.Debian won't help desktop users
> > > who just find that this strange "iceweasel" browser we install by
> > > default doesn't work on sites that firefox works on.
> > 
> > Could we do it in a more prominent perhaps?  
> 
> FWIW, I got from the README.Debian to #354622, but I was unable to from
> there figure out how to quickly and easily change the user agent.
> 
> A more prominent thing might be a hyperlink directly to the relevant
> about:config setting from the default start page .. or a pre-installed
> user agent switcher that has firefox in it as an option. I think that
> something like that would go a certian distance to making it accessible
> to users, though it would still be a bother.

I thought about this this week and I've come to agree with Joey's
position.

We could document exactly how to change the useragent for the user,
but why wouldn't they do this? From there perspective there are all
upsides and no downsides to making the useragent be Firefox, And if
everyone is going to mechanically change it (or want to change it),
then it's not really a good default.

While I agree that websites shouldn't be abusing useragent strings the
way they do, we can't win this fight on our own and in the mean time
our users are getting broken results that are in our power to fix.

Thoughts?

-- 
Eric Dorland <eric at kuroneko.ca>
ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: hooty at jabber.com

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