514610 - We need to know what Fennec's user agent will be

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

We've talked about this in person and there are a couple bugs that are waiting on it, but I haven't seen one filed.  We need to know what the Fennec user agent is going to be or at least how we can identify a Fennec browser.

Comment 1

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Supposed to have this last wednesday.  ->blocker

Comment 2

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

Since we are going to brand as "Firefox" we won't have "Fennec" in the UA, but I think we should put "Mobile" in the UA

Comment 3

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

I don't have a strong opinion here.  I've heard Stuart and Jay talking about UA strings; they probably have more to say.

There's a small amount of Web content that sniffs for Firefox rather than Gecko; if you used something like "Mobile Firefox" you'd probably pick that up.  But if you did that you'd probably want the version number after "Mobile Firefox" to match the Firefox version number.  Furthermore, if you had a different XUL app for a different class of mobile devices, you'd have to figure out what to call that app.

It also may be ok to leave the UA string as Fennec even if that's not the name used for marketing; that's what Netscape did for years (Mozilla/1.0, etc.).

Comment 4

[Stuart Parmenter]

current thinking is something like (but is subject to change):

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l; en-US; rv:1.9.2a2pre) Gecko/20090831 Firefox/3.6b2 Fennec/1.0

Comment 5

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> current thinking is something like (but is subject to change):
> 
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l; en-US; rv:1.9.2a2pre) Gecko/20090831
> Firefox/3.6b2 Fennec/1.0

How long until it's decided?

For the record, AMO (and probably plenty of other sites) will have to update their code because we detect Firefox with a slightly more complex version of: /Mozilla.*Firefox\/([^\s]*).*$/

Comment 6

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

AMO is going into codefreeze this week.  Without this the mobile pages won't be complete.

Comment 7

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

AMO is going into code freeze tomorrow.  

We've had meetings, emails, and now this blocker bug for 2 weeks.  What is blocking this being done?

Comment 8

[Richard A Milewski[:richard]]

WinMo devices have traditionally had screen size info in the UA string.   Not sure that's a good idea, but some hint as to the nature of the underlying device would be helpful. 

The current practice of fibbing about screen size and scaling down later is not going to improve the image quality of things like maps with fine lines. 

If you want to look at what other mobile devices do, there is several years history of UA strings and Accept headers with links to UAProf and WURFL data
at http://mobidev.rampage.net/history/devices.php

Comment 9

[Stuart Parmenter]

Wil: we're going to go with what I said.  Will be implemented in bug 517086.

Richard: I'd prefer not to specify screensizes, but we will be supporting the viewport meta tag, and css media queries.

Comment 10

[Joel Maher ( :jmaher ) (UTC -8)]

marking as verified.