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List:       kfm-devel
Subject:    Re: RFC:UserAgent string in kio_http
From:       Peter Kelly <pmk () post ! com>
Date:       2000-07-14 12:17:09
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Dawit Alemayehu wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I want to move the getUserAgent() from kio_http to KProtocolManager with the
> signature changed to getUserAgent( const QString& hostname ) for the following
> reasons
> 
> a.) We now have a better method to communicate such data using Waldo's meta-data
> implementation.  kio_http simply does metaData("userAgent").  That is it.  I also want to
> change the default string, in case no user agent info is supplied
> 
> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; kio_http $Id ; X)
> 
> You may ask why ?  I am beginning to suspect that many sites check the userAgent
> string to supply content and some of the weird problems people are experiencing
> such as not being able to login into some sites like Yahoo might somehow be
> related to this.   I of course have no conclusive proof of this and could utterly

My suggestion would be to go with something like "Konqueror; KDE 2.0"
rather than
trying to pretend that we are another browser. I can see the benefits in
the short term
(i.e. some sites e.g. hotmail not working with konqueror due do a
different user agent string), but in the long term this is just going to
make the whole browser detection problem worse. Since we are not 100%
compatible with mozilla (far from it - konqueror does not support a
number of the advanced features of mozilla), this is asking for trouble
because some sites could make their decision about what version of pages
to send out based on the assumption that we DO support these things,
thus also creating incompatibilities.

Assuming KDE continues to be popular and sites start to accommodate it
in their browser detection routines as they do with IE/Netscape, I'm
sure that most web authors would probably prefer this solution as it
will make the code easier to write rather than having to take into
account that some browsers say they're netscape, but we still have to
filter them out in some cases because they do not support all the
features.

My suggestion applies mainly to konqueror rather than kio_http itself -
konqueror could set it's own user agent string.

-- 
Peter Kelly
pmk@post.com

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