Monster UA string
Since we're a minority browser, many sites don't support us. This is fine when it's our bug, but sometimes a site is wrong to block us. Our rule is that we put some effort into contacting sites to get them to fix the problem, but in emergencies or where they're unwilling/able, we spoof.
Yahoo mail has three modes:
- It just works. As seen on majority browsers.
- It gives you a "your browser doesn't work" page with the option to try anyway. This is what it does for Windows Chrome. From my perspective this is the proper behavior until they feel like supporting Chrome, and I appreciate that many people lack the resources to support all browsers so I'm not too upset if it stays like this.
- Or it just decides that it can't work. This is what it does for Linux Chrome.
You might ask, how are Windows and Linux Chrome different? And the answer is "they aren't", except for the UA string. (And that we antialias fonts.) So I "fixed" it with a UA string tweak that I find hilarious.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.250.0 Safari/532.5
I imagine their regex must match "Windows \S+" or something to allow NT, XP, etc.
Arv notes that we're now claiming that we are all of:
- Mozilla
- WebKit
- HTML
- Gecko
- Safari
- Windows
- and Linux