1753805 - Add pref for enterprise users to override the User-Agent string's Firefox version

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Firefox version 100 will ship on 2022-05-03. The Webcompat team can use Firefox's site interventions to spoof a version 99 UA for individual sites broken by a three-digit version number. But Firefox’s site interventions can’t override the UA for enterprise intranet sites we don't know about.

This patch adds a new "network.http.useragent.forceVersion" pref that enterprise admins can set to a known-good UA version (like 99) in an enterprise policy file. If the pref has a non-zero value, then override the User-Agent string's Firefox version. The value 0 means use the default Firefox version.

We can remove this pref in Firefox 103 after the next ESR is branched (version 102 on 2022-06-28). Enterprise users can use ESR 102 with forceVersion pref = 99 until the next ESR in mid-2023. Hopefully they can fix their broken intranet sites by that time.

Comment 1

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Attachment: Bug 1753805 - Add pref for enterprise users to override the User-Agent string's Firefox version. r?#necko-reviewers,valentin

Firefox version 100 will ship on 2022-05-03. The Webcompat team can use Firefox's site interventions to spoof a version 99 UA for individual sites broken by a three-digit version number. But Firefox’s site interventions can’t override the UA for enterprise intranet sites we don't know about.

This patch adds a new "network.http.useragent.forceVersion" pref that enterprise admins can set to a known-good UA version (like 99) in an enterprise policy file. If the pref has a non-zero value, then override the User-Agent string's Firefox version. The value 0 means use the default Firefox version.

We can remove this pref in Firefox 103 after the next ESR is branched (version 102 on 2022-06-28). Enterprise users can use ESR 102 with forceVersion pref = 99 until the next ESR in mid-2023. Hopefully they can fix their broken intranet sites by that time.

Comment 2

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/e777c6baff74
Add pref for enterprise users to override the User-Agent string's Firefox version. r=necko-reviewers,valentin

Comment 3

[Andreea Pavel [:apavel]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/e777c6baff74