How often do you have to spoof your user agent when using K-Meleon? I have found that I have to spoof Firefox 3.5 for certain sites like Bing Maps. Even SeaMonkey 2.0 has problems with Bing Maps!

Visit this site to check your user agent. I visit it in other browsers & copy & paste the agent into a word processor. Then I can use the custom user agent in K-Meleon. :cool:

K-Meleon ~ Not a Melon!

I have found this site useragentstring.com
I change the string to firefox|ie when using hotmail. Otherwise I can not write into the text filed.

That's a really interesting site. I think I will leave my user agent as Firefox 3.5.5. for a while as it seems to be less of a problem getting into certain sites with K-Meleon then.

K-Meleon ~ Not a Melon!

For specific purposes always.
I use a specialized install for it (Could be also a profile since the change is located in prefs.js).

This says as default 4 Your link.

Your User Agent is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20091019

To achieve this - I deleted via about : config the string from general.useragent.vendor.

Reason: vendor is the only possible give-away when I spoof.

For detailed info about Your browsers go to gemal's browser spy.

At his page You can find out the possibly betraying strings.

K-Meleon dev kko's BBDetector page detects what layout engine Your browser has.

And it tries to figure out Your browser's real User Agent name.
It can find that I use a Gecko. That is all.

Which means: That my K-Meleon can flawlessly spoof any other browser with a Gecko Layout engine.

p.s. Mail Pages like: yahoo.mail, hotmail, gmail... and some social community pages have buggy browser detection that prevents full usage when You do not use a browser that they have white-listed.

For these pages I have installed Auto Agent Switch by disrupted.

If a page fails with get another browser looser try with spoofed Firefox strings.
Usually FF2 is sufficient rarely FF 3.x is needed.

This detailed browser sniffing works when JavaScript is active.

BTW. "To spoof always another User Agent String reduces the nominal %age in usage statistics. Nobody would find out even if K-Meleon had the needed market share. This would cause the nuisance to continue forever." Quoted from a Letter to hotmail.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/12/2009 06:03PM by guenter.

That's all very interesting. You are right, Firefox 2 is good enough to get into Bing Maps!

K-Meleon ~ Not a Melon!

Except for certain testing situations, I don't use any spoofing. If they don't work with KM, then I will go elsewhere.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

I have to agree. I never spoof. But then, most of my web browsing is to information based sites only, not social trivia. Even my online banking accepts my browser, KMLite user string, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090825 KMLite/1.1.2

My user agent string is of 'one size fits all' type:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5pre) Gecko/20091013
Firefox/3.5.4 K-Meleon/1.5.2 www.geckoisgecko.info

Whenever I get a new browser version, I check its gecko engine version, match its release date with the nearest anterior Firefox release and add it in the proper place...

This way I am not really spoofing, but I don't get barred from sites either.

--- sig ---

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/13/2009 10:41AM by foobarly.

I have noticed that if I spoof Firefox 3.5.5 more adverts & banners seem to get through K-Meleon's adblocker. So it is probably best to surf on default as a whole.

K-Meleon ~ Not a Melon!

Recently I noticed and was surprised, there seem also to be sites, that do NOT work with a Firefox spoof, while working fine with "default KM" agent! (like imageshack)

Usually I'm surfing on "default", because it doesn't help the statistics if all websites (wrongly) count me as a firefox or anything user Rarely I switch, mostly for testing too, but have checked "Reset to default on exit", so as not to accidentally forget switching back afterwards ;-)

I find that everything actually works fine with K-Meleon, except for Bing Maps, which tells me it doesn't support KM but lets me use it anyway. It all seems to work fine. Firefox is over-rated if you ask me. I wish K-Meleon would have worked on my computer when I first downloaded it in December 2008. 1.5.1 wouldn't bookmark properly. It's fine now. It's just a happy accident that I thought I would give it another try!

K-Meleon ~ Not a Melon!

*Sigh* I just discovered that Google Wave doesn't like K-M too well. Looks like spoof-time has come at last. *Dons Firefox mask and stalks the Wave...*

A.K.A. Arual the Wyrd

Glad to have read this thread, cuz it solved a long time question why I don't see closing crosses on MyYahoo in KM. They appear in FF. It never dawned on me that anyone would be stupid enough to use the user agent string to distinguish browsers...but there must be some bozos coding over there at Y!, I set myself up as FF2 and bingo -- they're they are.

I sent them info on what the problem is and how to fix it. But I doubt that will change anything.
Then last night I get a warning that my browser is out of date from Travelocity so they must be morons as well.

Is there any built-in function that strips the browser name from the UA string? I want to give KM credit in stats but I guess as long as it registers in there with "other" that might be okay. Then I could just use the combo FF/KM UA string that was quite cleverly suggested above.

Thinking about a real solution, maybe we could just lobby Mozilla to start sending a blank UA. That would force people to do real browser or engine sniffing or they would lose the whole Moz userbase. This whole UA thing is really ridiculous, it needs to end !!!

A waste of time IMO to contact them. I use disrupted's auto switcher.

Complain, appeal to logic?
It is a known Problem - for all Gecko browsers except firefox.

The issue is a FAQ in this forum, hotmail, yahoo, facebook,.... and a in length discussed.

Legion is the name of pages that have idiots' browser switch. Google: wrong browser or similar. Guess most of them would like to be listed for other keywords.
They want visitors after all. &

p.s. Glad to hear You fixed the problem with the cross in the tabs.
That is what matters to me.

---

Add auto switcher to the browser, maybe reviewers speak about it.
It would be a nice to have for users and a slap into the face of ppl using such scripts on their pages.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/2009 02:45PM by guenter.

I think I prefer foobarly's approach because it is much simpler than using a switcher and always shows K-Meleon in the UA string.

But does anyone know how it will really be treated in stats since Firefox is also mentioned?

I'm using K-Meleon because it's so much faster than Firefox and I want credit to go where it is due.

OK, in the last 24 hours my custom UA string has stopped working properly in Facebook and the only string that seems to provide full functionality is the built-in FF2. Unfortunately, this gives no credit to KM and isn't acceptable to Myspace (too old, although MS is quite happy to accept the default KM string).

So I've installed the UA switcher. Switching is not seamless if FB is opened in a tab but giving it it's own window seems to overcome the problem.

So sorry to be reviving a long dead thread, but it just really seems the most appropriated place to be posting some info about how User Agent String (UAS) manipulation is dealt by the Mozilla masters, along the with the total lack of concern (should I say downright contempt?) for user experience and/or autonomy:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581008

If I got it right, what this means is that appending to UAS via the about:config option 'general.useragent.extra*' is now disabled in all FF versions > 4.* and the only option remaining for that is using "general.useragent.override" to replace the whole UAS...

--- sig ---

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2011 10:16AM by foobarly.

I need to use this for my bank. I spoof KM 1.5.4 when I am using 1.6.0 because they won't accept a beta version.

I need it also for my brokerage. I have to spoof FF for them.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

Quote
JamesD
I need to use this for my bank. I spoof KM 1.5.4 when I am using 1.6.0 because they won't accept a beta version.

I need it also for my brokerage. I have to spoof FF for them.

KM uses the override pref, not the extra pref. So you shouldn't be effected.

I run a custom UA ~99% of the time so that I have Google search yielding 100 results per page in conjunction with a custom 100 results per page url. As far as I recall, I couldn't find any FF, IE, or Opera UA that would work the same with my custom url in KM.

Somewhat similarly, I run a custom Google search url in FF with the default FF UA that yields 100 results per page. From what I recall I couldn't get a KM UA to work with the custom url in my FF browser.

Now, mostly I run a FF browser, as a second browser--mostly minimized for quick access--when I want to run a FF compatable site and leave KM set to my custom UA.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/11/2015 06:00PM by KM2005.

Never.

If they don't like my browser, then I don't need their page.

Quote
KM2005
Somewhat similarly, I run a custom Google search url in FF with the default FF UA that yields 100 results per page. From what I recall I couldn't get a KM UA to work with the custom url in my FF browser.

Whatever, Google search that yields 100 results per page works fine in K-Meleon with its default UA. There is no need to change the UA for getting displayed 100 results per page.

Yogi, I'm meaning 100 results per page by default, without logging in and going to Advanced and setting it. Using the logged-in-method, if the cookie is deleted it resets back to the default 10 results per page; my method is always 100.

Quote
KM2005
Yogi, I'm meaning 100 results per page by default, without logging in and going to Advanced and setting it.

That's what I'm meaning too.
Per default, without logging in and without any cookie.

No trouble here either. My default is long since 30.
KM1.6, with KM-UA, no Fox in string.
It's been awhile that I experimented with additional search options, but this minimalistic version works fine (and probably is also among the default KM search engines, but too tired to investigate now ;-)

www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%s

---

(sig) New unofficial K-Meleon 76.4 (KMG76.4) available, in own subforum.
Based on Goanna engine, called 'test' builds forever but more stable as 75.1 acc. forum members. It's 1-2 generations ahead of predecessor KM76RC-2016
K-Meleon FAQ (link missing in forum sidebar)
Tips&Tricks - Learning new stuff every day
New to K-Meleon? What do you like? What not?

Quote
siria
www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%s

That's another option that indeed works on my pc setup, with the default KM-UA.

Editted in: www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%s for me does 100 results the first time with KM-UA and reverts to google's default 10 in a subsequent search. Same for in FF browser.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2015 12:46AM by KM2005.

Quote
yogi
That's what I'm meaning too...

Straight www.google.com doesn't work for me to yield 100 results; but my modified link now works in KM-UA (whereas I'm rather sure it didn't work before, or at least at one point in time) only the very first time; reverting to 10 results per page on a subsequent search.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2015 12:50AM by KM2005.

Still confused what you may be doing - how exactly do you run a "subsequent" search?
If I click "next page" the results do stay 100.
Of course google has a vivid life of it's own, which is changing occasionally, and my normal browser is heavily tweaked, but for testing did try now with a pure, unzipped, portable KM1.6 again:
still no prob whatsoever. With or without JS and cookies and referer.
Unless it's the KM version itself in the UA??

But I don't understand from the beginning what this mysterious tweak is that you talked about. Perhaps that is the culprit??

---

(sig) New unofficial K-Meleon 76.4 (KMG76.4) available, in own subforum.
Based on Goanna engine, called 'test' builds forever but more stable as 75.1 acc. forum members. It's 1-2 generations ahead of predecessor KM76RC-2016
K-Meleon FAQ (link missing in forum sidebar)
Tips&Tricks - Learning new stuff every day
New to K-Meleon? What do you like? What not?

@KM2005
This one should work:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?client=kmeleon&hl=en&num=100&suggon=0&as_qdr=all&safe=off&filter=0&q=

No redirection if you are outside of the USA, no sugggestions, no safe search and 100 results per page.
If you prefer another TLD instead of ".com", just change the TLD to your like.

Quote
siria
Still confused what you may be doing - how exactly do you run a "subsequent" search? If I click "next page" the results do stay 100.

"Subsequent": Run a search with a term, it yields results. If I use the same page again (not closing the prior search results page) to run a second search, then it yields 10 results per page.

Quote

Unless it's the KM version itself in the UA??

My default KM UA is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 K-Meleon/75.0

Quote

But I don't understand from the beginning what this mysterious tweak is that you talked about. Perhaps that is the culprit??

The only UA I've found to always work is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.17pre) Gecko K-Meleon/1.6.0
With:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&num=100&safe=active&q=

The same behavior occured in KM1.6.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2015 01:18PM by KM2005.