Ubuntu User at Home? Be Counted at Work.
I’m going to throw something out there that some of you might find quite controversial (although most of you won’t care I’m sure). As a self confessed over obsessive Ubuntu user, it’s quite satisfying to watch the upward trend of Linux users browsing the web. I feel every extra 0.00001% of Linux internet users closing in on the 4% of Mac users gives justification for all the web companies out there to take notice and support it. A bigger frustration that I’m hoping will soon disappear is the lack of cross platform tools produced for Linux such as the official Flickr uploader. I’m using Flickr as one of the especially frustrating examples around. It’s built using XULRunner which would require minimal effort to include Linux in the list of supported OS’s and even made available in a DEB package. Instead I watched desperate Linux users having to scrape together instructions on how to get it working between them in the forum. A quick search on Google shows this is quite a common annoyance. Even with a friendly and popular Linux distro like Ubuntu around, companies such as Flickr still aren’t paying much attention to us (although I’m not solely picking on them, there are far worse offenders out there than Flickr).
Here comes the controversy, although I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of this.
By day, I’m forced to use my Windows system to work on where I probably do over half of my browsing. I can’t be the only Linux user in this situation. Considering companies take notice of these browser and OS statistics and they’re not a realistic representation of people who actually use Linux at home, I decided to force my work browsing to be counted as my home Ubuntu machine is. I installed the User Agent Switcher add-on for Firefox and set up a user agent to mimic my Ubuntu machine, leaving it selected for all my work browsing.
Ok, this isn’t ground breaking stuff and feel free to hurl plenty of abuse as to why I shouldn’t be doing this, but if you’re a frustrated Linux user forced to be pushing up the numbers as a Windows user because of work, maybe you should join me.
After getting the User Agent Switcher add-on, here are the details I used to get me looking like an Ubuntu User -
- Description:
- Whatever you like
- User Agent:
- Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080207 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.12
- App Name:
- Netscape
- App Version:
- 5.0 (X11; en-US)
- Platform:
- Linux i686
- Vendor:
- Ubuntu
- Vendor Sub:
- 7.10