856699 - Pick a UA string for fennec on Ouya

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Should we use the tablet UA string? or the non-tablet UA string? Or some other UA string? Let the bikeshedding begin!

Comment 1

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

I took a look at GoogleTV user agent string and found:
https://developers.google.com/tv/faq#useragentstring

Do we want to treat Ouya as a "TV"? We have talked about using the Android "television" layout folders, which I think Ouya recommends.

The GoogleTV UA is close to the Fennec "Request Desktop Site" UA, which is basically Firefox for Linux Desktop.

Comment 2

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #1)
> Do we want to treat Ouya as a "TV"? We have talked about using the Android
> "television" layout folders, which I think Ouya recommends.

Yeah, I think that makes the most sense. I was discussing this with sriram and lucas, and we will be putting ouya/tv-specific layouts into a television layout folder.

Comment 3

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

Before a decision is made about the UA, we should talk about what type of content we want on this platform. (Desktop, mobile, something else?) Once we know the content, we can test any proposed UAs to see how they fare wrt the content that is desired.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Lawrence is right. We don't want to keep multiplying UA tokens. We already have Mobile, Tablet and (implicitly) Desktop, which is one more than ideal. I am not keen to add a "TV" token to the mix.

It seems to me that a TV probably wants desktop websites, apart from if it has a touchscreen, when it probably wants Tablet ones. Is that reasonable?

Gerv

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The other question is whether the Ouya runs Android apps. If so, it seems to me to make sense to identify as Android. If not, then it probably makes sense not to (otherwise you'll get all sorts of "Install our app!" messages on sites that you don't want). It looks like the answer is no, it doesn't: http://www.ouya.tv/faq/#12

The Ouya connects to a TV, and according to the Wikipedia page, it uses a mouse pointer/touchpad style of interaction. So I think we probably want desktop rather than tablet content. 

So, all in all, I suggest using the following UA:

Mozilla/5.0 (rv:12.0) Gecko/12.0 Firefox/12.0  

That's the Fennec UA for pointing-device devices, without the Android token. It would also be the UA used if B2G were ever on a point-device device.

Gerv