728582 - Remove "Intel" from the OS X User Agent

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[Morpheus3k]

Since Firefox 4.0 dropped the support for PPC, the User Agent of OS X does not need to contain the architecture ("Intel").
Therefore I suggest to remove this part of the User Agent:

From:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:13.0a1) Gecko/13.0a1 Firefox/13.0a1

To:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Mac OS X 10.7; rv:13.0a1) Gecko/13.0a1 Firefox/13.0a1

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

> Since Firefox 4.0 dropped the support for PPC,

There are contributed PPC builds available from http://www.tenfourfox.com/ thus it still matters even if the official support for that platform was dropped...

Comment 2

[Morpheus3k]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #1)
> There are contributed PPC builds available ...

Probably we could just drop it from "Intel" builds and leave it for PPC builds.

Officially Firefox uilds:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Mac OS X 10.7; rv:13.0a1) Gecko/13.0a1 Firefox/13.0a1

TenFourFox builds:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; rv:13.0a1) Gecko/13.0a1 Firefox/13.0a1

Another solution may be the different OS X Version. Since 10.6 alias Snow Leopard there is no support for the PPC platform.

I still believe that the reduction of size of the User Agent is a right attempt from Mozilla. Probably other vendors (or developer) could reduce the UA to the bare minimum (especially WebKit).

Comment 3

[Nomis101]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #1)
> > Since Firefox 4.0 dropped the support for PPC,
> 
> There are contributed PPC builds available from http://www.tenfourfox.com/
> thus it still matters even if the official support for that platform was
> dropped...
If this matters for tenfourfox, than they can easily revert this in their patch queue. I think Mozilla doesn't benefit much if they see that a PPC build has crashed (or has other issues), because the tenfourfox builds are highly patched. And Mozilla can do nothing for a non-functional PPC build.

Comment 4

[rsx11m]

Ok, I figured it may be worth considering prior to such a removal. In comparison, the Windows UA string doesn't state any processor specifics either by default and only adds tokens (like "x64" for a native 64-bit build) when necessary, so that sounds like a feasible approach.

Comment 5

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

I believe we're settled on the current UA approach