[webkit-dev] User agent woes

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 3:13 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
> The ideal scenario would be for Google Hangouts to correctly handle 
> WebKit UA strings on X11 platforms. It seems like Safari claiming to 
> be Mac Firefox would be a move in the wrong direction. (It might also 
> cause Hangouts to try to use features that are unsupported in Mac 
> Safari.)
> 
> What happens on Google Hangouts if you use your normal UA string?

I think it works just fine with our normal UA string, as it does with 
our current Firefox quirk, actually. We could try adding url.host() != 
talkgadget.google.com and url.host != hangouts.google.com checks to the 
urlRequiresFirefoxBrowser function, but I don't see any need to do so. 
I only mentioned Hangouts here to note that it prevents us from using a 
macOS quirk for Google unless we're able to target a specific 
subdomain, which is not always possible (e.g. maps.google.com is now 
just a redirect to google.com/maps). If we try sending different quirks 
based on the URL path, then getting the quirk to work becomes quite 
tricky because it requires figuring out the right set of subresources 
on the page for which to receive the quirk. So far, I've managed to 
avoid that mess.

By the way, the icing on the cake is that X11 is only in the user agent 
for compatibility purposes... Fedora has replaced X11 with Wayland now, 
and Ubuntu will too in its next release this October. But removing X11 
breaks some websites (including Google Calendar), so it's going to have 
stay forever.

Cheers,

Michael