[Pkg-chromium-maint] Bug#581066: Chromium reports wrong UserAgent string

[Lincoln de Sousa]

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 05:57:34PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Lincoln de Sousa wrote:
> 
> > Looking at the web server access log, I noticed that chromium
> > send the following user agent string:
> > 
> >   Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko)
> > Chrome/5.0.375.29 Safari/533.4
> > 
> > I don't think it is right, since I'm not using "Chrome" but "Chromium"
> > browser.
> 
> Forgive me for being dense, but why is this a bug?

I found that it is a bug because we have two different packages to
things I imagine that are two different browsers: Chrome and Chromium.

As a user I don't want to say that I'm using chrome, that's not free
and I don't want to spread its name throught the world =P

As a developer of web sites, I need to know which features each of
these two different browsers have. The following page shows some of
them:

  http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome

Discovering which feature a browser have by its user agent is not the
only (neither) the best way, anyway.

> Maybe it would be helpful for debugging and statistics gathering to
> add information about the Debian revision, like this:
> 
>  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.38 (Debian-5.0.375.38-r46659-2) Safari/533.4

The main reason to file this bug was think about the statistics saying
that I'm using a browser that I'm not =/.

Maybe adding the debian version would be a good idea too.

> 
> Or maybe it would be good to fix all sites that care and just declare
> that we are a newish browser, like this:
> 
>  Mozilla/8.0

Not a way to go at all =P

> You can experiment with how sites react to various possibilities with
> the --user-agent command-line option (which is undocumented for some
> reason).

Doing some tests here nothing seems to be different, neither google,
youtube and other google services that I was able to test without
registering.

People that changes the user agent string by hand usually know what
they want. For example, there was a web site of a bank of my country
(Brazil) that didn't work very well with free browsers, but was nice
with iPhone. Some webkit users started to send the iPhone browser's
user agent string to be able to use the bank site.

(don't think it is actually interesting in this discussion =P)

-- 
Lincoln de Sousa <lincoln at comum.org>

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