Saturday, March 06, 2010

Google continues ignoring SeaMonkey and firefox derivatives...

Google has recently started informing users of Firefox 2.x that their browser will soon stop being supported for its web sites and web apps.

And they recommend other browsers that people can upgrade to:

IE 7.0, Safari, Firefox 3.6, and Opera...

Well, ¿Where is SeaMonkey?. SeaMonkey is based on the same Firefox 3.5+ engine, so why not mention it?. In fact, Firefox IS the son of the Mozilla.org browser suite, formerly known as just "Mozilla" and then renamed to SeaMonkey.

In fact, Google should stop sniffing for Firefox versions and instead check out GECKO RENDERING ENGINE versions. Plus, they should mention and point towards SeaMonkey, too.

All Mozilla-based browsers use the same rendering engine, and it's good programming practice not to check for browser version but actually checking Gecko in the user-agent string sent by the browser to the web server, as suggested by Mozilla.org itself.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Browser_Detection_and_Cross_Browser_Support

IDEA: Hey Google, why don't you guys suggest people using an unsupported or soon-unsupported gecko engine to upgrade to "a newer Mozilla.org based browser" and point towards http://www.mozilla.org/projects/#applications , which includes not only Firefox but also SeaMonkey?.

FC

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