Seamonkey UserAgent String

[Rich Walsh]

I've been trying to change the useragent string in Seamonkey (Dave's build of 2.42.9esr/rv45.9) but it won't stay changed. When I close and reopen SM, it reverts to the "correct" string.

I installed "User Agent Switcher", imported a list of current strings, then tried it and found this problem. I've also tried editing 'prefs.js' directly (with SM closed), as well as changing "browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone" and "gecko.mstone". In every case, a restart restores all 3 entries to their original values. I'm not setting the new string to anything extraordinary: I'm just changing the existing OS/2 SM string to SM 2.46/rv49.0. Any ideas?

FWIW... I got started on this because I can no longer access my Google Voice page. This was previously the single-worst page I've ever encountered and could bring my system to a halt for minutes at a time. Now I just get its "waiting spinner" until it says it's done, but nothing is displayed. Strangely, the failure started shortly after I answered a brief survey and said I had to use the legacy version of the page because the current version has too much javascript. Now, I can't access either one.

[Dave Yeo]

Seems to stick here, at least testing at https://www.whoishostingthis.com/tools/user-agent/. I currently have Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; Warp 4.5; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.
The user agent switcher faq does mention that there are more ways to get the user agent (Javascript?) that user agent switcher doesn't affect. Also suggests deleting the pref,

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general.useragent.overrideor creating and setting to false the pref

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useragentswitcher.reset.onclosewith a warning about it being unsupported.
Otherwise cruft in your profile?

Yes some of these scripts brings SM to its knees, had one the other day that took maybe 15 minutes for the browser (and desktop) to recover and not long after SM crashed at the int 3 here,

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Trap  ->  8843B65E   XUL       0001:033FB65E  between mozalloc_abort + 2E and m
ozalloc_handle_oom - 52  (both in Unified_cpp_memory_mozalloc0.cpp)

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hi Dave,

Seems to stick here, at least testing at https://www.whoishostingthis.com/tools/user-agent/. I currently have Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; Warp 4.5; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.
The user agent switcher faq does mention that there are more ways to get the user agent (Javascript?) that user agent switcher doesn't affect. Also suggests deleting the pref,

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general.useragent.override...

I also use that same Add-on, however looking at this profile it would seem that the Add-on itself stores the user selected agent in that very place...so I'm not quite following the instruction to delete? Unless the assumption is that something has gone wrong, deleting it establishes a re-start point, which the UserAgent then picks up from and re-builds the profile value again.

[Dave Yeo]

I also use that same Add-on, however looking at this profile it would seem that the Add-on itself stores the user selected agent in that very place...so I'm not quite following the instruction to delete? Unless the assumption is that something has gone wrong, deleting it establishes a re-start point, which the UserAgent then picks up from and re-builds the profile value again.

That's probably the reason.
Since Rich brought this up, I've watched here and the user agent does reset periodically. Not on every restart but often enough that it is irritating.