Comments on: Blocking Firefox

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:42:34 +0000

Synonymous: Not when it’s pared with an ActiveX object, as seems to often be the case.

By: Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 01:46:04 +0000

Unfortunately, I don’t see the landscape being as nice as you describe in general. Yes, it _is_ that nice for Firefox, but as Firefox gains market share, what happens quite often is that the browser detection goes sniffing for “Firefox” in the UA string in addition to “MSIE” and blocks all other browsers or even just hides some features from them. And yes, that applies to some very high-level sites, including GMail, Google Maps, my Yahoo! and others. Things like that make Camino, MicroB and others send “Firefox” in their user agent so that they work with those sites. From where I stand, in a browser project that doesn’t have “MSIE” or “Firefox” in its UA (SeaMonkey in this case), the world is looking rather more grim than one or two years ago, actually

By: Synonymous

Synonymous — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:55:33 +0000

> or media related (and dependent on Microsoft Windows Media DRM)

What about the “Microsoft® DRM” plugins Firefox loads from the Windows Media Player?

By: Martijn

Martijn — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 04:55:27 +0000

Recently I heard about new sites blocking Firefox. However, this time however it is an active block, because Firefox has the ability to host extensions and these have the ability to block advertisements.
See http://www.infoworld.com/artic.....gst_1.html

Of course it is pretty stupid to block all Firefox-browser just for that reason, but some people just do not think. Of course one can also install ad blocking software on the OS level or in the IE browser, but I guess Firefox is more famous for it or in Firefox it is easier.
A better way would be to somehow detect the presence of an AdBlocking-extension and then tell the visitor that you do not like it. But that would require some programming experience instead of just some (server side) browser sniffing.