Google’s pacman doodle in Epiphany/Midori?

Google has had a very nice idea today, to celebrate Pacman’s aniversary: they made their logo become a playable HTML5 pacman. If you’re wondering why your WebKitGTK+ browser is not being able to play the game here’s why: Google is doing User-Agent sniffing and denying you the fun, sending a static image that you can click to perform a search instead of the game.

If you make Epiphany or Midori identify themselves as Chrome or Firefox, the game will work. I really don’t get this User Agent sniffing bullshit coming from Google. If you go to gconf-editor, and under epiphany->general set the user_agent key to “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-gb; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Firefox/3.8” it works. I’m starting to seriously consider User Agent spoofing for *.google.com as a quirk on WebKitGTK+. Lame.

Update: as a protest, I’m making blog.kov.eti.br and kov.eti.br say Chrome/Chromium are not supported, by doing User Agent sniffing.

Update2: it’s been pointed out to me that the game is not HTML5 – it’s actually smart usage of divs, and flash *urgh* for the audio

Update3: thanks to a friend who works at Google getting in touch with pacman’s designer, it looks like it now works without faking U-A – I’m happy for this, thank you! Despite this good step forward, google is still denying us the nice fade in effect, and still sees us as ‘unsupported’ in Wave and similar products, so I’ll keep my protest for now.