Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Jun 13, 2007

If you're using OS X and need/want to use Firefox, do yourself a favor and go grab the optimized version compiled specifically for Mac OS X. It's much faster in almost all aspects (launch, rendering, etc) and you can even get it with Firefoxy form widgets. There's only one problem I've encountered so far while using Bon Echo and that's with the Pageflakes website. But, that too, can be fixed!

I had actually run into this problem earlier on my Arch Linux system. Since it was happening with Konqueror too, I naturally assumed that it was either Pageflakes or Arch causing the problem. As it turns out, the cause is the *user agent*.

To fix it, we need to go ahead and grab the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox.

Once you've done that, you'll need to select a different user agent. Here are a couple that you can try:

  1. Windows: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
  2. Linux: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4

Once you've installed and selected a User Agent, PageFlakes should work again. Note that you'll have to select a User Agent each time you quit and relaunch Bon Echo/Firefox but, given the speed boost, I think you'll find it worthwhile.