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

[Jonathan Nieder]

Hi,

Lincoln de Sousa wrote:

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

Thanks for the explanation.

>> 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.

This is good to hear.  Maybe we should just change the Chrome/ to
Chromium/ and see if anyone screams.

>> 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

I disagree: once the sites are fixed, this is the right way to go.

There is no good reason for web pages to require detailed information
about the browser with each request.  Not even statistics gathering ---
javascript is a better tool for that.

There has been some discussion recently on the downsides of sending
too much information about a client to web servers:

  http://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf

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

I didn’t mean it as a workaround but as a development tool.

Thanks again,
Jonathan