I hear Yahoo! has a new home page that they’ve posted for a public preview. Although I don’t use Yahoo!’s home page much (tend to stick to the customized my.yahoo.com page and mail) I thought it would be interesting to see what’s going on. Much to my chagrin…
Well so much for that. Blocked by a “dumb” browser sniffer. What gives Yahoo? Stopping a user from content, even preview content, based on UA sniffing is sooooo 1998.
Now, what browser am I using you ask? Opera? Safari? Lynx? Trying to cheat by hacking my UA string to something clever? Nope. Camino 1.0.1 which is build off the same code base as some of the same browsers they’re letting in. The UA string: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060427 Camino/1.0.1
Now I can’t say if they’re targeting Camino specifically cause its not in some test matrix or for some other reason, or if they’re just overly strict in their matching patterns causing false negatives (which looks more likely), but in either case its pretty bad form.
Its certainly not the first case of a group that should know better preventing user access, Google’s done it too in the past. It also won’t be the last—no matter how much I wish it could be.
Hope others are enjoying the preview. maybe i’ll eventually get access to it, or happen across it one time i’ve got Firefox “proper” open.
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