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Firefox 16.0.2 advertises User-Agent string with "Firefox/16.0" without the patch-level version

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  • Last reply by philipp

chris@christopherschultz.net
chris@christopherschultz.net
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I'm running Firefox 16.0.2 on Mac OS X 10.8.2.

"About Firefox" reports that I'm on the "release"update channel.

The User-Agent string is "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0"

Why does the User-Agent string not say "16.0.2" instead of "16.0"? I know that if I follow a different update channel (like aurora, etc.), I'll get a shortened version-number in my UA string, but since I'm on the "release" update channel, I figured that when I got 16.0.2 the UA string would say "16.0.2".

Note that I've never tried to forge my UA string nor do I have any plug-ins that I can imagine would mutate the UA string.

I'm running Firefox 16.0.2 on Mac OS X 10.8.2. "About Firefox" reports that I'm on the "release"update channel. The User-Agent string is "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0" Why does the User-Agent string not say "16.0.2" instead of "16.0"? I know that if I follow a different update channel (like aurora, etc.), I'll get a shortened version-number in my UA string, but since I'm on the "release" update channel, I figured that when I got 16.0.2 the UA string would say "16.0.2". Note that I've never tried to forge my UA string nor do I have any plug-ins that I can imagine would mutate the UA string.

Modified by chris@christopherschultz.net

All Replies (3)

philipp
philipp
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hello chris, it has been a deliberate decision since firefox 16 not to expose the patch-level of the browser any longer, see bug #728831

chris@christopherschultz.net
chris@christopherschultz.net Question owner
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Thanks, @madperson... I didn't realize that was for release versions as well. It seems I can no longer force my (internal) users to be up-to-date with Firefox at the patch-level, which is too bad.

I consider the matter settled but if you have any suggestions for how to sniff my user's patch-levels so I can encourage them to upgrade, I'd love to hear some suggestions.

philipp
philipp
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unfortunately i'm not aware of any way to circumvent that - comment 27 in the bug report by a mozilla dev also says that it isn't possible to obtain that information by just looking at the http traffic (and even if there was a fancy way around that it would now apparently be classified as a privacy issue by mozilla and get fixed again as soon as this gets into the public domain)