503202 - Change Windows CE user agent string

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Some sites sniff for "Windows CE" in the User-Agent header, and serve back a stripped-down "mobile" version of the site. For example, CNN.com does this (in fact redirecting you to m.cnn.com). We really don't want this happening for Firefox on Windows CE (we can render the full content, and on some devices in fact have a normal high-res screen).

Vlad suggests just changing it to "WinCE".

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Attachment: Patch v.1

Comment 2

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I like dolske's other proposal "Windows 6.0 (CE)"

Comment 4

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Let's go with "WindowsCE" (no space).

Comment 5

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Attachment: Patch v.2

Comment 6

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Comment on attachment 387703 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v.2

Oops, this is v.2 ("WindowsCE, no space).

Comment 7

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

What will navigator.userAgent return? IIRC that's controlled by prefs (at least in FF).

Comment 8

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Comment on attachment 387703 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v.2

Looks good, please land away

Comment 9

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Pushed http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/4b3fc86f893e

Comment 10

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Would you mind adding WindowsCE to https://developer.mozilla.org/En/User_Agent_Strings_Reference ?

Comment 11

[Paul O'Shannessy [:zpao] (not bugmail, email directly)]

So this doesn't always solve the problem. It does a much better job than before but some redirectors seem to be a little smarter. See http://tw.yahoo.com/ (not that we're even able to render the characters on that page)

Comment 12

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

IE Mobile 6 has two modes: Desktop and Mobile

It changes the UA string depending on the mode.

IEM6, Desktop: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) 

IEM6, Mobile:  Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 8.12; MSIEMobile 6.0) 


http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx
http://nino.net/blog/internet-explorer-mobile-6/

Anyone think we should just do the same?

Comment 13

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

I don't; the "Desktop" version just makes it pretend to be Desktop IE.  We don't want to pretend to be the desktop I don't think.  Fennec should just set browser.useragent.extra.mobile or something to say "FennecMobile" or whatever to add it to the user agent string.

Comment 14

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

Verified fix on Tegra: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WindowsCE 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2a2pre) Gecko/20090818 Namaroka/3.6a2pre. 
also  Verified fix on Winmo: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WindowsCE 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20090817 Fennec/1.0a3pre.