Hi All, For Firefox OS, we are getting requests from partners to add tokens to the UA string which identify the hardware device on which Firefox OS is running.
There are at least reasons for this: * Some content providers strike deals with hardware manufacturers which allow devices made by the manufacturer to access content for free. One way that this is implemented is by looking for tokens in UA strings and serve content based on this. This is obviously terribly insecure and easy to spoof, however the hurdle is large enough that this is a "good enough" solution in many cases. I.e. the cost of developing a more secure solution, and the cost of losing users due to having to ask them to enter passwords etc is higher than the lost revenue due to people hacking the system by changing their UA string. * App stores only want to deliver applications to devices which they know will run on the device. Today many stores in our target market (Brazil) apparently do this by looking at hardware tokens in UA strings. This is a scenario where we strongly want people to do capability checking by using the DOM for reasons that we are all way too familiar with. However this isn't what stores do today and so we would have to convince them to switch to this system. Additionally capability checking isn't always perfect, since currently it's hard to detect performance metrics. Unfortunately I haven't been able to receive any concrete examples of either of these. Hence it's hard to evaluate the tangible benefits. However this apparently is a pretty wide-spread pattern in existing mobile devices. I don't have any hard data on how much this is done, but I did receive two examples: This is the UA sent by IE browser on a HTC device: Mozilla/5.0(compatible; MSIE 9.0;Windows phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; HTC; HD7 T9292) Here "HTC" is a token to identify the hardware manufacturer and "HD7 T9292" is a token which identifies the device. UA sent by a built in browser on a Samsung Galaxy device: Mozilla/5.0(Linux; U; Android 2.3.6;es-es; GT-S5830i Build/GINGERBREAD) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 Here "GT-S5830i" identifies the device. Let me know what you think. / Jonas _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
