588904 - Remove Mozilla/5.0 from UA string

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

This is a subset of bug 527886. I want this on file separately so we don't conflate things.

The only browsers (I'm aware of) that don't currently have Mozilla/5.0 are Opera and IE6. If people are sniffing for a lack of Mozilla/5.0, that'd lump us in with IE6, which is scary. If that's anything approaching common, this is WONTFIX.

Among the other browsers, we will break sniffers that expect the UA string to be in a certain order and contain certain tokens, even if redundant. That seems like a more important concern.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Would that break our current suggested sniffing : http://geckoisgecko.info/ -> http://archive.bclary.com/xbProjects-docs/geckoGetRv/ ?

Comment 2

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Actually IE7 and IE8 don't have Mozilla/5.0 either. IE9 will start pretending Mozilla/5.0.

Comment 3

[Dave Garrett]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Would that break our current suggested sniffing : http://geckoisgecko.info/ ->
> http://archive.bclary.com/xbProjects-docs/geckoGetRv/ ?

The current suggested Gecko sniffing there gets whatever is exactly in between the "rv:" and the ")" expected to directly follow it. That's it; it doesn't care about anything else in the UA string. That being said, our problem is the non-recommended sniffing methods.

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

Not gonna do this.

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

(For more rationale here, see bug 527886 comment 25.)