Bug 265572 – [GTK] User-Agent

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: WONTFIX
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Jim Mason]

Running: 2.42.2 (tarball) under Epiphany
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; SunOS i86pc) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Safari/605.1.15

I am encountering an increasing number of sites that complain about my browser.  One high street bank tells me that I have 'Chrome 97.0' and need to upgrade (but fortunately lets me continue anyway).  Another large bank thinks I'm on a mobile device (I am on desktop).  One brokerage firm refuses to deal with my browser at all.  whatismybrowser.com tells me I am on Safari 17.0 and that it's outdated.

Do other webkitgtk users face these issues in the wild?  Or do you think this might be related to my somewhat unique platform ident (X11; SunOS i86pc).  Should I masquerade as.... linux? mac safari?  I would prefer an honest user-agent string, but I will masquerade if I must (and I build from source, so can do that.)

Thanks for your insights.  On a related note, I see Bug 263619 is proposing an enhancement that may make this process more flexible in the future.

[Karl Dubost]

When the pages are easily accessible by anyone, creating a report on https://webcompat.com/ is a good way to track those and attempt to diagnose. I wonder if the gtk community is monitoring them.

For those where it's behind a login with private data it's a lot more delicate, as the user has to do the diagnosis themselves and try to explain which JS code is catching the UA string and make wrong assumptions. For Server side code, it is slightly more complicated.

[Karl Dubost]

See https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+label%3Abrowser-epiphany+
for the current list of issues.

[Michael Catanzaro]

I don't monitor webcompat.com because it uses GitHub, which doesn't allow subscribing to labels. I would only monitor this if GitHub allows subscribing to labels in the future, or if it moves to a platform where that is possible, like GitLab. Reviewing the closed issues there, I see they're being closed with resolutions that aren't particularly helpful anyway.

Jim, I'm going to close this bug report as not actionable because there's no specific actionable request here. We just need to address each problematic website specifically, one at a time, in separate bug reports. Feel free to create new bug reports for each website where you're encountering trouble.

I'm confident that the current user agent header is the most compatible it can possibly be; it's based on a decade of experience with web compat issues, and anything we change will just make things worse. It is simply impossible to craft a user agent header that works everywhere without quirks.