So Shiretoko isn’t Firefox So Why Call It That?

drubin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:11:38 +0000

I have been using the standard Ubuntu Jaunty repo version of Firefox-3.5 since before it was in the standard security repo when it was in fta’s ppa With this version I expected it to be buggy or have oddities such as being called Shiretoko. With the standard repository version I expect it to be Firefox

I know the reasoning was mentioned here some of the reasoning makes sense but if a user chooses to manually install firefox-3.5 they expect to get Firefox since this wont ever auto auto-update from 3.0 to 3.5 with out the users expressed permission I see this as an annoyance.

Calling it Shiretoko is annoying. Having the user-agent string below tends to break sites.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090701 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Shiretoko/3.5

Now I am not saying call this thing Firefox if it is really an ubuntu build of Shiretoko but since Shiretoko isn’t a standard or mainstream browser it wont be in any Device Database. such as WURFL or DeviceAtlas I say these because I mostly work with mobile related technology but the reasoning applies for any device db or user-agent checker.

Face Book makes horrid pop-up windows.

Use the Chat list on the right to start a conversation.You’re using an old web browser to browse Facebook. To use the full version of Chat from within a normal Facebook window, please upgrade your browser. Switch to Firefox.

Changing the user-agent of a browser in this day and age severely impacts on a users browsing experience. Since most websites now try to do browser detection (Some better then others) they generate different output for different browsers or even worse sorry this website only works in Netscape Navigator and IE 5 and above.

Rants of a mobile dev » User-Agent

So Shiretoko isn’t Firefox So Why Call It That?