[webkit-dev] User agent woes

[Michael Catanzaro]

Hi Maciej,

I agree with basically everything you wrote, except I recommend not 
using OS X as the operating system string in the default user agent 
except when actually running on macOS. We tried this for about a year 
and got tons of complaints. It breaks more than it fixes: many websites 
decide to present only macOS versions of downloads and offer no 
recourse to get the right version of the download (like Hangouts), and 
other times it's just annoying, e.g. the OS field on Bugzilla defaults 
to OS X, which a substantial subset of bug reporters feel the need to 
complain about. So instead, we now add OS X quirks for websites when 
needed.

> You mentioned that for some sites, that wouldn't work. I think it's 
> reasonable to have more specific exceptions just for those, and we 
> can review them together. Specifically, for Google Hangouts, you 
> mention that claiming to be Mac Safari will offer a non-working 
> plugin. However, it looks like WebKitGTK+ pretends to be Linux 
> Firefox for Google sites instead. It seems very likely that a Linux 
> Firefox UA string would break Google Hangouts in Mac Safari for 
> pretty much the same reason.

Yes, you definitely can't send a Linux+Firefox UA string, as that would 
definitely break Hangouts for Safari users.

But I bet you could send a macOS+Firefox UA string, until such time 
that Google fixes its websites to stop sending inferior pages to other 
WebKit browsers. That way, next time they decide to make a change based 
on UA that's going to cause other WebKit browsers to break, Safari 
should break as well and Google should notice before deploying the 
change if they test it at all. (Of course, this is only really needed 
if evangelism fails.)

> It's not clear to me what the issues are with typekit or slack, or 
> why you claim to be Chrome instead of Mac Safari on those.

I don't remember exactly why I came up with the Chrome quirk for these 
sites, but I usually try our macOS quirk first and use the Chrome quirk 
next if that fails. The macOS quirk is much safer as it does not 
encourage websites to try to use Chrome-specific JS.

The issue with Typekit is that lots of websites use Typekit for web 
fonts, but Typekit disables itself unless it recognizes the user agent. 
Then users complain that fonts are wrong on a bunch of different 
websites. See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147296.

Slack just doesn't work at all with our default UA, it displays only an 
unsupported browser page. It works perfectly fine with the UA changed.

>  Maybe claiming to be Mac Safari would reduce future breakage. Or if 
> not, it would be interesting to know what the issue is.
> 
> We may also be able to reach out to some of the problem websites or 
> help you get contact info.

This would be wonderful. I don't think it's worthwhile to reach out to 
websites like Slack and Whatsapp that are clearly intentionally trying 
to block our users: I'd rather them not realize that we are sending UA 
quirks at all, as they might try harder to block our users if so. But 
in other cases, like with Google, we would really appreciate your help 
with evangelism. Let's continue this line of discussion via private 
mail.

Thanks,

Michael