Remove "Ubuntu" identifier from User Agent strings

Bug #1716139 reported by Wes
36
This bug affects 8 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
chromium-browser (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned
firefox (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

The Chromium and Firefox builds add an extra Ubuntu identifier in their user-agent strings. The inclusion of the OS name is unnecessary and could contribute to user fingerprinting.

Other distros such as Fedora do not add their name to the distro browser builds' UA as far as I can tell, and google-chrome UAs do not reveal OS distro version info.

chromium-browser:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/60.0.3112.113 Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36

Change to:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chromium/60.0.3112.113 Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36

Firefox:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0

Change to: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0

In Firefox the build ID can identify the package build anyway so it isn't necessary to have the distro in the UA string.

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in chromium-browser (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Changed in firefox (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Wes (wesinator)
Changed in firefox (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
Wes (wesinator)
Changed in firefox (Ubuntu):
status: Fix Released → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Wes (wesinator) wrote :

This was fixed in Firefox 57 but reintroduced in 57.0.1

Revision history for this message
Paolo Melchiorre (paulox) wrote :

Please consider removing unnecessary OS information form Chromium.

Revision history for this message
Wes (wesinator) wrote :

Also, the chromium snap UA has extra info identifying it as a snap:
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) snap Chromium/72.0.3626.96 Chrome/72.0.3626.96 Safari/537.36"

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