[webkit-reviews] review denied: [Bug 12854] Allow FrameLoaderClient to override navigator.appVersion : [Attachment 13313] patch: Allow FrameLoaderClient to override navigator.appVersion

[bugzilla-request-daemon at macosforge.org]

Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> has denied Darin Adler <darin at apple.com>'s
request for review:
Bug 12854: Allow FrameLoaderClient to override navigator.appVersion
http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12854

Attachment 13313: patch: Allow FrameLoaderClient to override
navigator.appVersion
http://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=13313&action=edit

------- Additional Comments from Darin Adler <darin at apple.com>
Issues like this one, which affect compatibility with websites, for the most
part should be consistent across multiple versions of the WebKit engine. We
should not have different approaches to site compatibility for different
versions of WebKit unless there's a compelling reason to do so.

If reason (1) is truly compelling, then I suggest having the user agent string
change, and not just the appVersion. Early versions of WebKit did indeed use a
different user agent on different websites, but after much reflection we
decided this was not a scalable approach to site compatibility.

As far as reason (2), if a browser wants to spoof and report different things
to different websites, I recommend changing the user agent string rather than
just changing appVersion.

Overall, I think that the way this patch is coded is fine, but I'm not
convinced this is a good feature to add to WebKit.

Marking the local variable "ua" as const isn't really all that helpful,
especially in a one-line, two-statement function, so I suggest leaving it off.

I'd find this more convincing if someone said specifically that they wanted to
use this in a particular version of WebKit and explained the benefits in a more
concrete way.