113500 - Wrong User-Agent sent by URLConnection in Carbon MRJ Plugin

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Anders Korsvall]

Build: 2001113008
Platform: Mac OS X 10.1.1
Carbon MRJ Plugin version: 1.0d6

The User-Agent header sent when using URLConnection in an Applet is "Java1.3.1".
This may or may not be a problem, but the Sun Java Plugin on win32/linux sends
the user agent of the browser (for example "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT
5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.6+) Gecko/20011202").

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 113499 ***

Comment 2

[shrirang khanzode]

v

Comment 3

[Peter Lubczynski]

This may not be a dup. Let's let Patrick decide.

Comment 4

[Patrick C. Beard]

I know of no way to change this header, short of replacing all of the 
protocol handling code and have it vector through to the browser's 
networking code. Perhaps somebody at Sun could suggest the best way 
to do this.

Comment 5

[Steve Dagley]

Patrick, should this bug be transfered to Brian?

Comment 6

[Winnie Lam]

minusing this bug as per adt plug-in's triage.  unlikely that we can get this
fixed for the next netscape release.

Comment 7

[Patrick C. Beard]

Implementing Java protocol handlers will fix this bug. Marking dependent on bug
#135840.

Comment 8

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

Reporter or anyone else still seeing this issue with the latest Firefox 3 Nightly Build ?
If not please close this bug as WORKSFORME. Thank you.

Comment 9

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Steven, what do you make of this? We're not using the Carbon MRJ plug-in anymore, aiui. Is this an issue in JEP?

Comment 10

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Recent versions of Sun's Java Plug-In (at least since Java 1.4.2) and
Apple's corresponding JVMs (licensed from Sun) all set the User-Agent
header for the JVM's built-in "web browser" (which uses the
URLConnection class) in exactly the same way:

The first part of the User-Agent string is set to the (Java)
"http.agent" system variable -- which is "Mozilla/4.0" plus a string
(in parentheses) representing the client's operating system and
version.

On OS X 10.4.10 http.agent is "Mozilla/4.0 (Mac OS X 10.4.10)".

On my SuSE Linux 9.2 installation http.agent is "Mozilla/4.0 (Linux
2.6.8-24.25-smp)".

On Windows XP http.agent is "Mozilla/4.0 (Windows XP 5.1)".

The second part of the User-Agent string indicates the version of Java
that's currently running.

So on an OS X 10.4.10 client using J2SE 5.0, the whole User-Agent
header is:

"Mozilla/4.0 (Mac OS X 10.4.10) Java 1.5.0_07"

On my SuSE 9.2 installation it's:

"Mozilla/4.0 (Linux 2.6.8-24.25-smp) Java/1.4.2_11"

On Windows XP it's:

"Mozilla/4.0 (Windows XP 5.1) Java/1.5.0_12"

It doesn't make any sense for the User-Agent string used by the JVM's
"built-in web-browser" to mirror the actual client browser's
User-Agent string -- the "built-in" browser is very old and primitive,
and isn't able to render many recent HTML constructs.

And as far as I can tell, Sun's Java Plug-Ins (as opposed to Apple's
pre-Java-1.4.X plugins) _never_ mirrored the client browser's
User-Agent string.

So this bug report, whatever its original status, is now INVALID.

Comment 11

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Attachment: Simple Java applet to display JVM's User-Agent string

Here's a simple test applet that displays the JVM's built-in browser's
User-Agent string.  The applet calls back to the server to display a
simple web page inside the JVM's built-in browser (one that displays
the built-in browser's User-Agent string).

These files need to be served from a web server that supports PHP.