1324506 - Incorrect User Agent for 50.1

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[whatismybrowser]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.71 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Open Firefox Menu -> About Firefox
Look at version number: "50.1.0"
whatismybrowser.com -> look at user agent "[...] Firefox/50.0"


Actual results:

The version fragment "50.0" in the user agent is incorrect.


Expected results:

It should be "50.1" as this is what the About Firefox window says.

I run whatismybrowser.com and a number of people have reported this same issue to me (complaining that the "firefox is out of date" warning is incorrect - it isn't, the problem seems to be Firefox's user agent is incorrect).

Comment 1

[[:philipp]]

hi, this is by design. we only reveal the major version number to websites but not the patch level of the browser.

Comment 2

[[:philipp]]

please also see bug 728831 & bug 870868 as historical background on this.

Comment 3

[whatismybrowser]

Thanks for the reply philipp.

I still think this is actually a defect; if you're only reporting the "main" version of Firefox and not the point releases, the fragment should be

Firefox/50

not

Firefox/50.0

That way, it is still accurate (...enough) but also not giving bad information; saying that its running 50.0 when in fact it is running 50.1

For what it's worth, I think not reporting the full version of Firefox is a bad idea - it adds absolutely miniscule benefit to the user, while also stopping them receiving more significant benefits, but I understand this probably isn't the place to debate it.

Either way, if Firefox is only going to report the main version number, the fragment shouldn't be misleading by including the ".0" when it isn't necessarily a .0 release.

Can we agree to fix this please.

Comment 4

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

(In reply to whatismybrowser from comment #3)
> I still think this is actually a defect; if you're only reporting the "main"
> version of Firefox and not the point releases, the fragment should be
> 
> Firefox/50
> 
> not
> 
> Firefox/50.0

Unfortunately it will break some silly version sniffers. So we have no choice. We couldn't even remove the silly "20100101" from the user-agent string.