Googled has tightened restrictions for login

I discovered this a couple of days ago, went to login to my Gmail account, and got a message that my browser does not have javascript enabled or is an incompatible browser.

This is on my laptop, which has SeaMonkey 2.53.3. I just checked, The latest EasyOS has SM 2.53.4, and can login to Gmail OK.

What I did with SM 2.53.3, is go to "about:config" then search for "useragent", then there is this parameter:

general.useragent.compatMode.strict-firefox

Which is set to "false". Right-click on it and choose "toggle", so it then becomes "true". Then login to Google works.

I think that it is really dumb that some companies will bar a browser based on the user agent string, given how easy it is to change it.

You can check your browser user agent string here:

https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent

Running 2.53.4 right now, and without the above parameter toggled to "true", this is what I get:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0 SeaMonkey/2.53.4

If I were to toggle that parameter to true, the user agent is the same except doesn't have the "SeaMonkey/2.53.4" on the end.

I am wondering whether I should set that parameter as "true" by default? It is simply an entry in /root/.mozilla/*/prefs.js:

user_pref("general.useragent.compatMode.strict-firefox", true);

If anyone reports this login problem with latest SM, then will do.

EDIT 2020-10-22:
How about that, yesterday was able to login to Google with my 2.53.4 SM, this morning can't. Setting "strict-firefox"  user agent has fixed it, so that will be the default for next release of EasyOS. 

Tags: tech