GNU bug report logs - #58011
Jitsi, Bowser, and IceCat's user agent string

Previous Next

Full log

View this message in rfc822 format

From: Michael McMahon <michael <at> fsf.org>
To: 58011 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#58011: Jitsi, Bowser, and IceCat's user agent string
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2022 14:37:08 -0400

I received a report that an IceCat user was not able to use Jitsi with 
IceCat 102.  They reported that changing the user agent string to 
Firefox fixed their issue.

IceCat 102 should work with Jitsi, but the way that bowser reads the 
user agent string returns that the browser is IceCat which it is not 
familiar with.  Rather than submitting patches to to every browser check 
to correctly identify IceCat as a Firefox fork, I would recommend 
changing the user agent string back to Firefox as it once was [1] to 
correct this issue as well as others that have not been reported.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnuzilla/2015-01/msg00019.html

Abrowser uses Firefox in the user agent string and this problem does not 
occur with Jitsi or bowser.

IceCat 102's user agent string looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 IceCat/102.0

Abrowser 104's user agent string looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:104.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/104.0

Best,
Michael McMahon | Web Developer, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: 4337 2794 C8AD D5CA 8FCF  FA6C D037 59DA B600 E3C0
https://fsf.org

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.