SeaMonkey 2.53.10.1 looking good

I have compiled SeaMonkey 2.53.10.1 in EasyOS. Went to some sites and it looked good, unfortunately youtube.com did not look good:

Running SM from a terminal, this message is displayed:

JavaScript error: https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/310f846f/jsbin/desktop_polymer.vflset/desktop_polymer.js, line 839: TypeError: window.customElements is undefined
Document https://youtube.com/ loaded successfully

So, I went to the mozillazine forum, and found reports about this same problem with YouTube, for example here:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&p=14909757

You can see what the useragent is for your browser by going here:

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

SeaMonkey 2.53.10.1 identifies itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0 SeaMonkey/2.53.10.1

However, I have preset firefox-strict override, which causes the useragent to become:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

...and that is what breaks YouTube.

If you type "about:config" in the URL-bar, then enter "useragent" in the search-box, you will see this:

general.useragent.compatMode.strict-firefox = true

...if you right-click on that entry, you can toggle it to "false", and then you will revert to the first useragent shown above, and YouTube will work.

But then you have put yourself into a "catch 22" situation. The reason that I enabled strict-firefox is because some sites will refuse to work if the useragent identifies itself as SeaMonkey.

There are various ways to tackle this problem. I have decided to leave strict-firefox enabled, and create site-specific overrides. On that about:config page, right-click in a blank area of the window, and there is an offer to create a new entry. You want a new entry of type "string". This is what I created:

New entry and content:

general.useragent.override.youtube.com
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20211207 Firefox/68.0 SeaMonkey/2.53.10.1

YouTube now works. On mozillazine it has also been reported that setting "Firefox/60.0", without the SeaMonkey part, works.

Testing Ungoogled Chromium

A quick change of topic. I have been testing Ungoogled Chromium. Quite a nice experience; however, on my old Compaq Presario it takes about 20 seconds to start. Once started, it is OK. Better than Firefox, which takes about 24 seconds.

I do not like it that they are so slow to startup. I like that Presario. It "only" has 2GB RAM, but EasyOS and most apps are quite snappy. My recollection is that SM starts fairly fast also. So, it is a down-rating for Chromium and FF, and up-rating for SM.

Just while I think of it. SM defaults to a sans-serif font. What do you think about that? Should I change it to a serif font?

I am thinking that for the next release of EasyOS, will revert to SM. Let me know if you have issues with any sites. Or, you might be able to create a site-specific useragent that fixes it. That "Firefox/60.0" might be good, telling the site that you have an older version of Firefox.   

Tags: easy