The most current case of user agent detection is to know if the device is a mobile to redirect the browser to a dedicated Web site tailored with mobile content. Firefox and Mobileįirefox OS and Firefox on Android have very simple documented User-Agent strings.įirefox OS Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile rv:18.0) Gecko/18.0 Firefox/18.0įirefox on Android Mozilla/5.0 (Android Mobile rv:18.0) Gecko/18.0 Firefox/18.0 It seems to be an easy solution at first but it creates an environment easy to by-pass in spoofing the user agent. Some companies will be using the User-Agent string as an identifier for bypassing a pay-wall or offering specific content for a group of users during a marketing campaign. Remember that there are huge benefits to create a system which is resilient to many situations. User agent detection leads to situation where a new player can hardly enter the market even if it has the right set of technologies. It is not only Mozilla products, every product and brand has to deal at a point with the fact to be excluded because they didn’t have the right token to pass an ill-coded algorithm. We have to deal on a daily basis with abusive user agent detection blocking Firefox OS and/or Firefox on Android. You could fall in the same traps as the ones existing with user agent detection algorithms. Each time you detect a product or a feature, it is important to thoroughly understand why you are trying to detect this feature. Responsive design helps to create Web sites that are adjusting for different screen sizes. New solutions are being developed for helping people to adjust the user experience depending on the capabilities of the products, not its name. All of these have costs in resources and branding. Sites get abandoned, libraries are not maintained and Web sites will break just because they were not planned for the future coming devices. Updating databases and algorithms for identifying correctly is a very high maintenance task which is doomed to fail at a point in the future. The diversity in terms of physical characteristics will only increase. The space of small devices (smartphones, feature phones, tablets, watches, arduino, etc.) is a very fast-paced evolving space. By design, you will detect only what is known, not what will come. User-Agent sniffing is a future fail strategy. User agent detection (or sniffing) is the mechanism used for parsing the User-Agent string and inferring physical and applicative properties about the device and its browser. They lie about what they really are and they are used for branding and advertising the devices they run on. Currently, the user agent strings have become overly long. That identified user agent, even if they might not work as well forīasically, the HTTP specification discouraged since its inception the detection of the User-Agent string for tailoring the user experience. That the user intentionally desires to see responses tailored for If a userĪgent masquerades as a different user agent, recipients can assume With them, as this circumvents the purpose of the field. Tokens of other implementations in order to declare compatibility Likewise, implementations are encouraged not to use the product Identified against their wishes (“fingerprinting”). ![]() Overly long and detailed User-Agentįield values increase request latency and the risk of a user being Needlessly fine-grained detail and SHOULD limit the addition of ![]() It should be included.įast forward to August 2013, the HTTP/1.1 specification is being revised and also defines User-Agent.Ī user agent SHOULD NOT generate a User-Agent field containing This is for statistical purposes and the tracing of protocol violations. This line if present gives the software program used by the original client. The prose already invited people to use it for analytics and identify the products with implementation issues. Its syntax was defined as “ the software product name, with an optional slash and version designator“. The HTTP Protocol as defined in 1991 didn’t have this field, but the next version defined in 1992 added User-Agent in the HTTP requests headers. User-Agent: is a string of characters sent by HTTP clients (browsers, bots, calendar applications, etc.) for each individual HTTP request to a server.
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