[Netsurf-develop] User Agent

[Wes K]

Hi all,

I've just tried going to http://www.voidedwarranty.com/ (looking for
inspiration on a little RISC OS re-casing project) and it tells me that
I have been blocked as I am "using a possible harvester on this site". I
suspect that the user agent "NetSurf" is also used by a malicious
program in peecee land? Would be awfully nice to be able to change the
user agent string, even if it's only changable from NetSurf's choices
text file for now.

The owners of the site have been emailed about this problem and
hopefully they should sort their act out.

Cheers and thanks for such a great web browser!

[Wes K]

Hi all,

I've just tried going to http://www.voidedwarranty.com/ (looking for
inspiration on a little RISC OS re-casing project) and it tells me that
I have been blocked as I am "using a possible harvester on this site". I
suspect that the user agent "NetSurf" is also used by a malicious
program in peecee land? Would be awfully nice to be able to change the
user agent string, even if it's only changable from NetSurf's choices
text file for now.

The owners of the site have been emailed about this problem and
hopefully they should sort their act out.

Cheers and thanks for such a great web browser!

[James Bursa]

Post by Wes K
I've just tried going to http://www.voidedwarranty.com/ (looking for
inspiration on a little RISC OS re-casing project) and it tells me that
I have been blocked as I am "using a possible harvester on this site". I
suspect that the user agent "NetSurf" is also used by a malicious
program in peecee land? Would be awfully nice to be able to change the
user agent string, even if it's only changable from NetSurf's choices
text file for now.

We're reluctant to make this a global option, because this will certainly
result in many people browsing with a different UA string all the time.
Webmasters will thus see distorted statistics, and may be more likely to
write, for example, IE-specific pages. In addition, sites which use the UA
string to decide what to send will send the wrong page.

I think that the ability to use a different UA string for a list of
problem sites only could be a good solution.

Thanks!
James

[Stuart Halliday]

Post by James Bursa
We're reluctant to make this a global option, because this will certainly
result in many people browsing with a different UA string all the time.
Webmasters will thus see distorted statistics, and may be more likely to
write, for example, IE-specific pages. In addition, sites which use the UA
string to decide what to send will send the wrong page.

It works well for Fresco when I use ANTutils which has this faking ability.

Also in the UA string can't you place an extra comment like:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Netscape; Windows XP; Netsurf; RISC OS)

Which would help a web log to notice it?

Post by James Bursa
I think that the ability to use a different UA string for a list of
problem sites only could be a good solution.

I agree.