[Nottingham] Firefox becomes an Iceweasel & abrowser!

[David Aldred]

2008/9/16 Christopher Joice <linuxisthefuture at gmail.com>

>  On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 21:24 +0100, David Aldred wrote:
>
> What is this 'Firefox' of which you speak?
>
> (Says he from the standpoint of a Sidux/Debian system, which uses Iceweasel
> branding anyway!  The only hassle is that my on-line banking doesn't
> recognise Iceweasel as the same as Firefox, so I have to spoof it ).
>
>
> Exactly, Arch Linux has been using the code names for each Firefox release for ages, for exactly these reasons, I currently run "Gran Paradiso", aka Firefox 3.
>
> Like David, I've had to edit my configuration to change my browser name to
> Firefox, as banks etc. are too stupid to not go by the rendering engine
> rather than the name of the gui.
>

Now then: is anyone in here close enough to the coding of individual
browsers to clarify this?   I asked my Bank some time ago why they accepted
Safari but not Konqueror, and was told that while they use the same
rendering engine, the way they handle cached data varies, and it was the
security of the cached data (or to be more precise the fact that certain
data was *not* cached under Safari but was under Konqueror) which led to
their having Safari on the whitelist but not Konqueror.

If that argument makes sense, then it's reasonable for banks to limit access
according to browser rather than rendering engine; I don't know enough about
where the engine stops and the browser-specific design takes over to know.

(Even so, you'd think they might know that Iceweasel and Firefox are one and
the same - but I must say I've never bothered to point it out to them, and
perhaps no-one else has either!).

--
David Aldred
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