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Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:39:42 -0800
From: Andrew Sharp <andy.sharp@onstor.com>
To: Charissa Willard <charissa.willard@onstor.com>
Cc: Tim Gardner <tim.gardner@onstor.com>, Jay Michlin
 <jay.michlin@onstor.com>
Subject: webui browser checking algorithm headaches
Message-ID: <20070126183942.3819b22a@ripper.onstor.net>
Organization: Onstor
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Howdy folksez,

Well, isn't the world of "open" source exciting?  It seems that things
are a bit mucky with Firefox 2.0, as mozilla.org has changed their
Trademark Policy, and will not allow Linux distro's that repackage
Firefox in their own way to call the program or the package
'firefox'.   Hence these distro's are going to call it 'iceweasel' -- no
doubt just to piss off mozilla.org.

The distro's caught up in this nonsense includes Debian, the distro of
choice for all experienced Linicians, but also includes FedoraCore
(Redhat) and Suse(Novell) and several others.

Sooo, I upgraded to the latest version of things this afternoon, and our
webui refuses to talk to my browser now, probably because it's
identifying itself as iceweasel 2.0.1 or something like that.

We need a better way of handling this.  We can't just refuse to even
try to talk to a client.  Or there needs to be a manual override,
perhaps where the user hand-selects what browser client s/he is
prepared to claim s/he is running.  Do we even know for sure that some
browser clients don't work with our javascript?  Which ones?  Opera?

Probably the proper way to handle this is to allow all clients based
on the Gecko browser engine, which is the heart of Mozilla, Firefox,
Konqueror(KDE), Epiphany(Gnome), and of course Iceweasel, rather than
checking for Firefox. Here is the user-agent string from my newly
upgraded firefox-nee iceweasel:

66.201.51.66 - - [26/Jan/2007:18:19:22 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 772
"-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1)
Gecko/20061205 Iceweasel/2.0.0.1 (Debian-2.0.0.1+dfsg-2)"

I believe it should be pretty easy to check for Gecko/build-date rather
than Firefox/version.


Thoughts?

UI-less in Campbell,

a


