817361 - Useragent string changed; Version number incompatible.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Leif Neland]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20121119183901

Steps to reproduce:

Visited site which tested for gecko version.
But version number is not date anymore, but 17.0



Actual results:

Site barfed


Expected results:

Previous useragent strings were from the start like
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Up to 
Mozilla/6.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:16.0.1) Gecko/20121011 Firefox/16.0.1

8 characters after Gecko/ is a date.

But current version is 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0 
Website tries to parse the 8 characters after Gecko/ "17.0 Fir" as a number, and barfs.

Please change useragent to the usual format-

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

That was done on purpose and got reverted with FF17.0.1

Comment 2

[Leif Neland]

Well, now the version date is just wrong, must be on purpose...
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0

Comment 3

[Scoobidiver (away)]

(In reply to Leif Neland from comment #2)
> Well, now the version date is just wrong, must be on purpose...
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
It's indeed on purpose because the build date is useless for any websites even for those that do UA sniffing.

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

that's bug 591537 and the UA ot frozen to remove http fingerprinting.

Comment 5

[j.j.]

(In reply to Leif Neland from comment #2)
> Well, now the version date is just wrong, must be on purpose...
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0

The build date is frozen since Gecko 2.0 (Firefox 4)
The right way to get the Gecko version all times was to ask for the "rv:" value.
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/final-user-agent-string-for-firefox-4/