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This is a proposal for what the Firefox Mobile User Agent string should be, which has been endorsed by the Fennec team. It takes into account various newsgroup discussions, plus John Jensen's [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AushOZLFQoR0dGQ0Ry1HYmZGUEg5dXJDYUstS2dwcWc&hl=en_GB#gid=0 comparative analysis] of various potential User Agent strings. (See below for more info on how to correctly interpret that data.) | This is a proposal for what the Firefox Mobile User Agent string should be, which has been endorsed by the Fennec team. It takes into account various newsgroup discussions, plus John Jensen's [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AushOZLFQoR0dGQ0Ry1HYmZGUEg5dXJDYUstS2dwcWc&hl=en_GB#gid=0 comparative analysis] of various potential User Agent strings. (See below for more info on how to correctly interpret that data.) We hope to implement it before Fennec Beta on 31st January. | ||
==Summary== | ==Summary== | ||
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Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10 | Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10 | ||
In addition, variance in the user agent string adds additional bits of entropy which can be used for [http://panopticlick.eff.org/ browser fingerprinting]. For this reason, we have done [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fingerprinting work in Firefox 4 and beyond] to try and reduce UA string variance | In addition, variance in the user agent string adds additional bits of entropy which can be used for [http://panopticlick.eff.org/ browser fingerprinting]. For this reason, we have done [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fingerprinting work in Firefox 4 and beyond] to try and reduce UA string variance. | ||
So our hope is to provide the shortest UA string possible, encourage good practice in sniffing, avoid giving developers footguns, and (as much as possible) avoid breaking existing working sites. It is not a goal to make sites which are currently broken to work - we don't think playing that game this way leads to a good outcome, and are committed to solving that problem through [[Mobile/Evangelism|evangelism]] and compatibility improvements to our platform. But <b>we want to and must nail down what the string should be, so we can start the work of evangelism without the risk of telling sites things which later turn out to become false.</b> | So our hope is to provide the shortest UA string possible, encourage good practice in sniffing, avoid giving developers footguns, and (as much as possible) avoid breaking existing working sites. It is not a goal to make sites which are currently broken to work - we don't think playing that game this way leads to a good outcome, and are committed to solving that problem through [[Mobile/Evangelism|evangelism]] and compatibility improvements to our platform. But <b>we want to and must nail down what the string should be, so we can start the work of evangelism without the risk of telling sites things which later turn out to become false.</b> | ||
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===Why "Android"?=== | ===Why "Android"?=== | ||
Because our analysis shows it makes an enormous difference in terms of getting a decent mobile site. | Because our analysis shows it makes an enormous difference in terms of getting a decent mobile site - 14 percentage points on the difflib analysis. | ||
B2G isn't Android and may well not say "Android"; we will have to work hard to get sites to not sniff for Android going forward. But right now, the Fennec team judged that we need it in there. | B2G isn't Android and may well not say "Android"; we will have to work hard to get sites to not sniff for Android going forward. But right now, the Fennec team judged that we need it in there. | ||
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Given that we are Mozilla, there's a strong emotional attachment there. But that may not be enough to outweigh the fewer-bytes-sent argument, if the compatibility impact is weak. | Given that we are Mozilla, there's a strong emotional attachment there. But that may not be enough to outweigh the fewer-bytes-sent argument, if the compatibility impact is weak. | ||
==John Jensen's Data== | |||
XXX Insert guidance for interpreting that data here | |||