[webkit-dev] UA string changes blog draft

[Peter Kasting]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com> wrote:

> I've created a draft blog post at http://www.webkit.org/blog/?p=1580 about
> the recent changes I and others have made to the UA string.  I'm interested
> in any feedback you might have.
>

Note, since this is a draft, you need to log in to blog.webkit.org to see it
(creating an account is simple and free).  For those who haven't logged in
or don't wish to, here's the current fulltext.

PK

---
UA String Changes On WebKit Trunk <http://www.webkit.org/blog/?p=1580>Posted
by *Peter Kasting* on Friday, March 25th, 2011 at 10:44 am

Recently some changes to the UA string (tracked by
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54556) have landed.  These changes
are designed to add UA string detail, remove redundancy, and increase
compatibility with Internet Explorer, and are happening in conjunction with
similar changes in Firefox 4 (which you can read about at
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/final-user-agent-string-for-firefox-4/).

Here’s a few sample pre-change UA strings:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.19.4 (KHTML,
like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/533.19.4
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/534.16+
(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/533.19.4

Here’s some sample post-change UA strings:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/5.0.3 Safari/534.24
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/534.24
(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/534.24

In detail, the differences are as follows:

   1. On Windows, the initial “Windows;” platform identifier has been
   removed.  This was redundant with the subsequent OS version identifier, and
   is more compatible with Internet Explorer, whose UA string doesn’t have this
   initial token.
   2. The “U” SSL encryption strength token has been removed.  This token
   dates from more than a decade ago, when U.S. export laws limited the
   encryption strength that could be built into software shipped to various
   other countries; the valid values are ”U” (for “USA” 128-bit encryption
   support), “I” (for “International” 40-bit encryption support), and “N“ (for
   “None”, no encryption support).  These days, it’s unusual to ship without
   128-bit SSL support everywhere; ports can add “I” or “N” if necessary.
   3. On 64-bit versions of Windows, tokens have been added after the OS
   version.  32-bit builds running on 64-bit Windows have added “WOW64“.
    (”WOW64″ stands for “Windows 32-bit On Windows 64-bit” and is the name
   Microsoft gives its 32-bit compatibility subsystem.)  64-bit native builds
   use “Win64; x64” for x64-based processors and “Win64; IA64” for Itanium
   systems.  These tokens are useful for sites that need to provide download
   links for native executables, and match what Internet Explorer uses.
   4. The locale has been removed.  Web authors who want to know what
   languages a browser supports should use the HTTP Accept-Language header
   instead, which can supply multiple locales.
   5. Windows CE builds should report the OS version slightly more
   accurately (e.g. “Windows CE 5.1” instead of “Windows CE 5.x” or “Windows
   5.1“).

Google intends to ship Chrome 11 with these changes, assuming they don’t
cause major web compatibility problems, in order to get them into place as
soon as possible after the Firefox 4 and IE 9 launches, and is already
testing them in Chrome Dev and Beta channel builds.
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