Wouter Verhelst

complained about the long user-agent string of Konqueror.

User agent strings are used by many web app writers to optimize their broken webpages for what they think your browser is. As I’ve already said in my previous blog post, most web app writers can’t write proper code (nor proper HTML). So they have thousands of broken ways to deal with user agent strings.

Even Microsoft, who is really not a fan of Mozilla, claims to be Mozilla.

Including some information about your browser and OS can in fact be useful. E.g. if you visit the firefox homepage, it will provide a quick download link for your language and operating system. Agreed: Debian users don’t need this download link. Still this is a good thing at first.

If you are concerned with privacy, you should probably use privoxy, or override the user agent string. But you aren’t anonymous on the web anyway…

Back to user-agent strings. I recommend sticking to the Mozilla User-Agent string specs. They have collected some experience on what you can do to your user-agent string without breaking stuff.

But I do agree with you that the full Debian package revision string is maybe a bit extensive, while the “like Gecko” thing is stupid.

For those interested, here’s the Galeon string: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050802 Galeon/1.3.21 (Debian package 1.3.21-6)

There is few of bogus information here: it is Mozilla/5.0, and the “X11; U; Linux i686; en-US” stuff is pretty much standard since Netscape 3 or so. The mozilla revision 1.7.10 is what I am in fact using, the engine is Gecko while the UI is Galeon (which e.g. means that I can use smart bookmarks).

And I think it’s good to include Debian in the version string. This will increase our projects visbility. ;-)