Bon Echo
I don’t use Linux 100% any more like I used to, which is a shame. It’s largely because I do a lot of work from home and it I need to be in Windows. And when I have booted in to Arch Linux, I tend not to pacman -Syu very often - I don’t know why, I guess it’s a it ain’t broken thing. Anyway, upgraded yesterday and I had 200Mb of stuff waiting to be upgraded, including Firefox 2. I’ve been using FF2 since it was released on Windows and I was happy to see it has graduated out of testing in AL. However, I forgotten about all the fuss about FF branding, and now AL has ‘Bon Echo’ instead.
A few things struck me:
- What a silly name.
- What a silly logo - not even SVG.
- That silly name is now in the user-agent.
I dare say that no-one else cares about the first two points - and fair enough. However, point three is something that slightly grated. It’s only a name, for god’s sake! Within 5 mins of launching FF2 (or BE2) on AL I was on YouTube, and whilst it seemed to work ok, I was constantly distracted with a little message about an unknown user-agent. It made me think about the fact that there are many websites looking out for that user-agent string for reasons other than browser stats.
As annoying as it is, browsers are not 100% compatible and so web devs have worked hard to try and ensure their site works great on the main browsers. Web devs know about Firefox. “WTF is Bon Echo”, I imagine they are saying.
It didn’t take me long to dive into about:config and change the user-agent back to what it should be. In hindsight, perhaps I should have left it to see if there were any possible side-effects: does gmail work properly? What about Hotmail? Meebo? And so on. So now I will need to change this manually each time pacman upgrades FF/BE, right? Bugger that, I think I’ll just download the official binary and have done with it.
November 27th, 2006 at 12:10 am
Just FYI, Gmail works. I’ve been there just now. Strange, I didn’t even notice Firefox was changed to Bon Echo. I hope the free software movement is not coming to a messy ending…
And yes, I am annoyed about the logo. The fiery fox was waaay too cool to change.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:02 am
From the sounds of it, you want to keep chaning your user agent a lot to see what happens. Turns out that there’s an easier way than moneying with the about:config options. Check out this plugin: http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/ , it makes it possible to change user agents to your own presets really easily.
January 17th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
[…] İşte Archlinux da Debian’a uyduğu için, ismi Bon Echo diye değiştirdi. Fakat bu da bazı sıkıntılar da beraberinde getirdi. Örneğin ben Greasemonkey, ya da daha önce yazımda da bahsettiğim gibi Gmail eklentilerini kullanamıyorum. Son olarak da Splash eklentisi bunların arasına girdi. […]