721632 - Tracking Bug: UA String Decision

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P1)

Description

[Erin Lancaster [:elan]]

Mobile engineering team is investigating UA String options and QA is providing examples of the user experience those options lead to with top 10+ sites. Everyone knows what do to and that we need to land on this before Jan 31st. 

See: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/User_Agent

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Alexa Top-Site 30 Screenshot Comparisons (tested with a Samsung Nexus S running Android 4.0.3)

* Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:12.0) Gecko/12.0 Firefox/12.0
** http://people.mozilla.com/~atrain/mobile/Evangelism/01-2012-topsites-02/Jan-27-2012/ICS-Phone/01-27-Top30-ICS-NexusS.html

* Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:12.0) Gecko/12.0 (like AppleWebKit) Firefox/12.0
** http://people.mozilla.com/~atrain/mobile/Evangelism/01-2012-topsites-02/Jan-27-2012/ICS-Phone-2/01-27-Top30-ICS-NexusS.html

* Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.3; en-us) Gecko/20120127 (like AppleWebKit) Firefox/12.0a1 Mobile/12.0a1
** http://people.mozilla.com/~atrain/mobile/Evangelism/01-2012-topsites-02/Jan-27-2012/ICS-Phone-3/01-27-Top30-ICS-NexusS.html

* Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.3; en-us) Gecko/20120127 Firefox/12.0a1 Mobile/12.0a1
** http://people.mozilla.com/~atrain/mobile/Evangelism/01-2012-topsites-02/Jan-27-2012/ICS-Phone-4/01-27-Top30-ICS-NexusS.html

Comment 2

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

Patch is in bug 671634

The patch creates the following UAs for Fennec:
(Phone)
"Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120131 Firefox/12.0a1 Mobile/12.0a1"

(Tablet)
"Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120131 Firefox/12.0a1"

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #2)
> Patch is in bug 671634
> 
> The patch creates the following UAs for Fennec:
> (Phone)
> "Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120131
> Firefox/12.0a1 Mobile/12.0a1"
> 
> (Tablet)
> "Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120131
> Firefox/12.0a1"

This seems to differ from <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/User_Agent> quite a lot. Why?

Comment 4

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

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #3)
> (In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #2)
> > Patch is in bug 671634
> > 
> > The patch creates the following UAs for Fennec:
> > (Phone)
> > "Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120131
> > Firefox/12.0a1 Mobile/12.0a1"
> > 
> > (Tablet)
> > "Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120131
> > Firefox/12.0a1"
> 
> This seems to differ from <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/User_Agent> quite
> a lot. Why?

See http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/msg/8133920a2ccf4d5b

Comment 5

[Erin Lancaster [:elan]]

#3 UA String: 
After the back and forth over friday, saturday, sunday; We ended up coming back to a simple change from the existing UA:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120127 Firefox/12.0a1 Mobile/12.0a1"    <--- PROPOSED (Phone)
"Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120127 Firefox/12.0a1"    <--- PROPOSED (Tablet)

* Changing "Fennec/VERSION" to "Mobile/VERSION" for phones
* Dropping "Mobile/VERSION" for tablets

Any other changes to the UA are not limited to Mobile and should be a Mozilla-wide change. I mean:
* Changing "Gecko/DATE" to "Gecko/VERSION"
* Dropping binary part ("armv7l") from the "Linux" token

Comment 6

[Erin Lancaster [:elan]]

The above is taken from an email by mark finkle: ^

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Erin: dropping "armv7l" is not a Mozilla-wide change; the Desktop user agents have already had their OS/platform tokens trimmed for fingerprinting reasons. That happened some time ago. If the idea here is to follow the lead of desktop, armv7l should be removed.

Gerv

Comment 8

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

Closing this. The UA is done

Comment 9

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

Is there any remaining work here for Beta 12? Or does bug 671634 cover everything.

Comment 10

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

Bug 671634 covers it

Comment 11

[Cristian Nicolae (:xti)]

Verified fixed on:

Firefox 15.0a1 (2012-04-29)
Firefox 14.0a2 (2012-04-29)

Device: Samsung Captivate
OS: Android 2.2

Device: Asus EEE Transformer TF101
OS: Android 4.0.3