Feature request: Global Spoof Setting
 

Per an exchange with 808 in a different thread, I would like to put out a feature request for others to support or shoot down.

It would be good to have a global spoof setting because it may very well be more convenient to emulate Safari (or Firefox, depending on what you do) by default if only because OW will probably never register on the radar of most web developers.

If it's on the drawing boards, then apologies to the OW team. If not, who else wants this feature?

FWIW, this used to be a feature in OW. IIRC, it was removed in v.5.

I am glad this feature has been removed. The global spoofing feature effectively contradicts it's meaning. The issue it tries to resolve is web developers not considering certain browsers because they're deemed too small of an audience. Changing the HTTP header to circumvent clumsy checking, may help a user navigate a single site. Using it globally, while perhaps making it slightly more convenient, results in a lower perception of overall usage of that browser.

[QUOTE=Forrest]FWIW, this used to be a feature in OW. IIRC, it was removed in v.5.

I am glad this feature has been removed. The global spoofing feature effectively contradicts it's meaning. The issue it tries to resolve is web developers not considering certain browsers because they're deemed too small of an audience. Changing the HTTP header to circumvent clumsy checking, may help a user navigate a single site. Using it globally, while perhaps making it slightly more convenient, results in a lower perception of overall usage of that browser.[/QUOTE]

Fair enough. As long as I don't have to keep changing site settings in order to view a page, I suppose I can do without a global spoof setting.

At the moment, I think the reason why OmniWeb 5.5 isn't working on the Apple pages is because it is still identifying itself as the version of WebKit in Safari 1.2.x:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) [b]AppleWebKit/125.4[/b] (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari) %@

Regardless of that, for the majority of web sites where you would have to spoof another browser, it would be IE 6 on Windows and not Firefox or Safari. Is that something you really want to promote? It would just re-inforce the attitude of some developers that they can maintain the [i]status quo[/i] and ignore users who aren't using PCs and who aren't using IE 6 (personally, my attitude to those sites is that they don't get my custom unless I can not avoid them at all). FWIW, my question about the absence of this setting from General prefs was based on having not had to set it for a long, long time and I had forgotten that it was site specific only. I must have been getting it mixed up with OmniWeb 4.x.

Touche
 

No, nor argument there. Rather, my concern was that there would be a difference between Safari and OW, and that it might be better to emulate Safari because Safari is being supported nowadays.

[QUOTE=philonous]No, nor argument there. Rather, my concern was that there would be a difference between Safari and OW, and that it might be better to emulate Safari because Safari is being supported nowadays.[/QUOTE]

on the other side of the coin, who'll ever support OmniWeb if their server logs just show a lot of Safari users?

[QUOTE=Rachael]on the other side of the coin, who'll ever support OmniWeb if their server logs just show a lot of Safari users?[/QUOTE]

It's quite a pickle. I don't deny it.

If OmniWeb goes on using WebKit, I'm not sure it's an issue as far as proper support is concerned: if the page is properly coded for Safari, they will be for OW as well. Now as far as promoting OW goes, it would be a bad thing to always spoof as Safari.

Hence the solution of OW 5. Not to spoof unless required for a specific site. Wow. One issue solved for good! :)

[QUOTE=Rachael]on the other side of the coin, who'll ever support OmniWeb if their server logs just show a lot of Safari users?[/QUOTE]
As others have said, support for Safari, or more accurately WebKit, is support for OmniWeb. The only reason it isn't currently 100% true is because of the delay in upgrading to (the latest version of) WebKit, that is the Safari 2.0.x version. We know the reasons why, but once it is done I hope the next upgrade(s) will be more timely. They should be I guess. At the moment it might actually be the case that the next release of OmniWeb is using a newer version of WebKit than the official release of Safari! :eek: