Bug 9515

Summary:

Safari lies. Reports itself as Mozilla, Gecko and KHTML too.

Product:

WebKit

Reporter:

Nicholas Shanks <nickshanks>

Component:

Page Loading

Assignee:

Nobody <webkit-unassigned>

Status:

RESOLVED WONTFIX

Severity:

Normal

Priority:

Version:

420+

Hardware:

Mac

OS:

OS X 10.4

Attachments:

Description	Flags
Better User-Agent headers	hyatt: review-

Nicholas Shanks

Reported 2006-06-20 01:29:58 PDT

I don't think Safari should claim to be anything other than Safari. In particular, it shouldn't start with "Mozilla/". I realise that this may break the odd site here and there, but if they are browser sniffing I most likely don't want to read the contents anyway. It's time to assert conformance and good behaviour on the web by not having sloppy user agents. If you agree, apply this patch to your local builds. I don't expect it to get into ToT though.

Attachments
Better User-Agent headers (1.26 KB, patch) 2006-06-20 01:30 PDT, Nicholas Shanks	hyatt: review-	Details Formatted Diff Diff
View All Add attachment proposed patch, testcase, etc.

Nicholas Shanks

Comment 1 2006-06-20 01:30:54 PDT

Created attachment 8930 [details] Better User-Agent headers

Dave Hyatt

Comment 2 2006-06-20 01:41:00 PDT

Comment on attachment 8930 [details] Better User-Agent headers I belive every single browser has Mozilla/ at the start. That is historical and is used all over the Web. I don't think we can dump that. We also can't dump the (KHTML, like Gecko) portion, since that breaks numerous DHTML menus and frameworks. This isn't something we like, but it also isn't optional. We have to work with the real world Web.

Maciej Stachowiak

Comment 3 2006-06-20 01:42:18 PDT

What Dave said. Even IE claims to be Mozilla.

Nicholas Shanks

Comment 4 2006-06-20 09:26:33 PDT

Well Opera uses "Opera/9.00 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X; U; en)" so :-P

Geoffrey Garen

Comment 5 2006-06-20 10:15:52 PDT

That's not entirely accurate. Opera may use "Opera" by default, but my understanding is that it masquerades as other browsers (using their exact UA strings -- much more extreme than just "Mozilla/...") on many sites that would break otherwise.

Nicholas Shanks

Comment 6 2006-06-20 12:27:55 PDT

So, it has a hard-coded list of sites to lie to? Well I could live with something like that in Safari. Maybe even in a text file the user can edit somewhere in */Application Support/Safari/ ? I mostly posted this for people to download and apply to their own builds, so I'm not that bothered by the review-, honestly :)

Alexey Proskuryakov

Comment 7 2006-06-20 12:57:48 PDT

To use a non-standard user agent, one can just set a Safari preference: defaults write com.apple.Safari CustomUserAgent "MyBrowser/1.0 (NewtonOS 10.4.7; en-US-blonde)" Disclaimer: I haven't tested this myself :)

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