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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Kubuntu Settings in KDE
From:       Germain Garand <germain () ebooksfrance ! org>
Date:       2008-03-25 16:39:23
Message-ID: 200803251739.23336.germain () ebooksfrance ! org
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Le mardi 25 mars 2008, David Faure a écrit :
> On Saturday 22 March 2008, Chani wrote:
> > >  * kio_httprc: set Firefox userid on google.com, makes gmail and
> > >    calendar work
> >
> > +1
>
> +1. But if google says later "see, nobody is using konqueror anyway" (from
> their webstats) we'll have to remember that konqueror doesn't appear as
> such :)

That is really the least trouble you can expect..
Any User Agent spoofing that is not directly endorsed by the end user is a 
recipe for complete disaster.

All browser vendors learned this one day or the other the hard way - and it 
sometimes took them many years to recover, as is examplified by Opera.

This is of course tempting, because you have this short term benefit of 
pleasing your users, and having a web site that mostly works for some time.
But this is forgetting something very simple: the web content owner does not 
*want* to be bothered by your browser at all, and *wants* to control the 
experience of his visitors.

When he receives complaints from candid users that his site "suddenly does not 
work anymore" in a browser that was not meant to be supported at all at this 
level of functionality, and discovers this browser is spoofing without the 
user's explicit consent, he will strongly dislike it. What matters to him are 
your users and their experience, not your browser, and you are actively 
working against this will.

So he will make sure he can identify your browser in spite of the User Agent 
string and other primitive disguises - using flaws, bugs, incomplete 
implementations, whatever. 

When this finally happens, you are SOL. 

So this is not a solution but a complete resignation, and as great chess 
master Xavier Tartacover famously puts it, "Nobody ever won a game by 
resigning."

Greetings,
Germain

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