[OpenIndiana-discuss] Firefox 123.0.1 has changed UA (User-Agent) value?

[Richard L. Hamilton]

> On Mar 21, 2024, at 11:53, Udo Grabowski (IMK) <udo.grabowski at kit.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 21/03/2024 16:11, Predrag Zečević via openindiana-discuss wrote:
>> For example, previous version UA was:
>> 
>> "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; SunOS i86pc; rv:122.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/122.0"
>> 
>> Now is:
>> 
>> "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:123.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0"
>> 
>> Why? How?
>> 
>> Just spend 30 minutes searching log files for *SunOS* (no one else uses it, so
>> it is nice :-))
>> 
>> 
>> P.S: I have removed UA switcher before writing this, and bounced FF
>> 
> 
> I also see this, and it has a nice side effect: You can now join
> Zoom meetings via the browser (since there's no zoom client for SunOS)
> without being rejected by Zoom per default at the entrance page ...

On the downside, this under-represents Solaris and derivatives to anyone looking at web server logs. For something already uncommon as a desktop, that's probably not helpful.

The user agent selector extension sounds like a really good idea, with a note of the known cases where presenting oneself as something other than SunOS (Solaris, OpenIndiana, Illumos, etc) may enable additional functionality.

That leaves the question of what would be the better default without it. I could argue that either way (with some bias that accurate is best in the end, even if that's not until the afterlife), but in the absence of knowing of more than one (the Zoom example) case where it affects functionality, I'd have to reluctantly favor greater functionality. Regardless, some  user-facing note of the issue would IMO be good.