[philonous]

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?

[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.

[philonous]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

[JKT]

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) AppleWebKit/125.4 (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 status quo 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.

[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.

[Rachael]

Originally Posted by 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.

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