Re: [Lynx-dev] Lynx browser can not connect to www.referenceusa.com

[Stefan Caunter]

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Tim Chase <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 2013-10-09 10:34, Jason Min wrote:
>> When I use Lynx browser to connect to www.referenceusa.com, it
>> fails after 10 trials, whereas other browser like firefox and
>> chrome have no problems.
>
> It looks like it's sniffing the User Agent and acting broken when it
> receives something it doesn't recognize.  I just swapped my
> user-agent string (in the Options) from my default Lynx user-agent of
>
>   Lynx/2.8.8dev.12 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/2.12.18
>
> to the user-agent string from my copy of Firefox:
>
>   Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
>
> and it at least loaded (I'm not familiar with the site, so I don't
> know what to expect).
>
> It's bad site-design on their part to only allow certain user-agents,
> but you can't control stupidity.
>
> -tim
>
>

on the command line you can say

lynx -useragent=mozilla http://www.referenceusa.com

to unstupid the site

to set it permanently in the options file, change this line in lynx.cfg

ENABLE_LYNXRC:useragent:ON

otherwise your change only lasts for the one browsing session

--stef