[mythtv-users] BBC iPlayer website request fetches mobile site

WAYNE M waynemot at msn.com
Wed Aug 10 13:39:51 UTC 2011


On this Macbook pro I've got the UA string for Firefox 5 is this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:5.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0.1

At least that's what PHP sees when you ask for the $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] which should be the initial part.

Col P

> Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2011 20:33:36 -0400
> From: afc at shibaya.lonestar.org
> To: mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] BBC iPlayer website request fetches mobile site
> 
> On Tue, Aug 09, 2011 at 07:23:42PM -0400, Nicolas Riendeau wrote:
> > Hi!
> > 
> > On 8/9/2011 7:05 PM, Paul Harrison wrote:
> > > The BBC must be looking at the user-agent string being passed by Qt
> > > Webkit and assuming wrongly that the browser is running on a mobile.
> > > It's easy to fake a user-agent string just by overriding
> > > QWebPage::userAgentForUrl(const QUrl&url).
> > >
> > > I've just made this change locally and it works fine it's just a few
> > > devs tend to get their knickers in a twist when something like this is
> > > discussed so not sure if it can be committed. Obviously the Qt devs
> > > think it's OK to fake the user-agent string otherwise they wouldn't make
> > > it so easy to do so.
> > 
> > Do you have to pretend to be something it is not (Firefox, Opera, ie, 
> > etc...) or simply changing the default string for something else works? 
> > If it does maybe identifying the browser as MythBrowser could be an 
> > acceptable solution?
> 
> This discussion comes at the perfect time for me!  Although not related
> to MythTV, I'm having problems with google+: it claims my browser is too
> old and I can't do anything.  It was suggested that I change the user
> string, and for that I installed the user agent switcher available for
> firefox.  It seems to work but the sample file that comes with it is
> too old, so my question is: what is the user string of the latest
> firefox?  Obviously I don't want to get into upgrading firefox.
> 
> This is the sample file:
> 
> 
> <useragentswitcher>
> <useragent description="Firefox 2 (Windows XP)" useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0" appname="Netscape" appversion="5.0 (Windows; en-US)" platform="Win32" vendor="" vendorsub=""/>
> </useragentswitcher>
> 
> I suspect that some consistency checks are done for known versions, so
> just changing these fields to "best guess" values is likely not to work.
> 
> I'm using Iceweasel 3.0.6 (Firefox renamed because of Debian political
> issues) and it's too old for google+.
> 
> Does anyone know what values should go into the different fields above?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Augustine
> 
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