Buggy WhatsApp misdetects Chromium with Ubuntu's patched useragent

[Mikhail Novosyolov]

Starting about a week ago, https://web.whatsapp.com stopped working with Ubuntu's Chromium, it suggests to install Google Chrome.

If change useragent from
userAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/70.0.3538.110 Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
to
userAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36

or rebuild chromium-browser without chromium_useragent.patch, than this buggy website starts to work with Chromium

I tried to reach WhatsApp autoresponders by writing to <email address hidden>, but did not get an answer from human.

I've made this bug just to inform you about the problems that the patched useragent may cause and to help other people solve the problem.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for the report Mikhail.

Would you mind rewording the description to keep its tone polite, please (see https://www.ubuntu.com/community/code-of-conduct)? As much as you dislike WhatsApp, aggressive wording is not going to help find a resolution.

Thanks in advance!

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Related discussion on the chromium-discuss mailing list: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-discuss/MbfH-OZGbLc

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

And the official answer from WhatsApp: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-discuss/MbfH-OZGbLc/4JhhGlg-CgAJ

[Mikhail Novosyolov (mikhailnov)]

> Would you mind rewording the description to keep its tone polite
Ok, reworded a bit.

> And the official answer from WhatsApp
That is not an official answer because their robot autoresponder or support just copy-pasted a template and did not try to investigate the problem. I think they've broken parsing useragent unintensionally, but I don't know how to reach their developers, not robots.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I'm changing the status to "Won't Fix", as this is not something that will be fixed in the Ubuntu chromium package.

web.whatsapp.com used to work fine with chromium in Ubuntu, and they made a server-side change to detect the chromium UA string and block it. This is unfortunate.

The chromium in Ubuntu UA string hasn't changed in several years, it is not going to be updated to support just one capricious website.

For users affected, it was suggested that using an extension to spoof the UA string (such as "User-Agent Switcher for Chrome") would work around the problem.

[Mikhail Novosyolov (mikhailnov)]

Yes, I totally agree that it is not an Ubuntu problem and should not be fixed... But maybe someone will come here by this bug report. Or maybe someone has an idea how to reach WhatsApp developers.

Custom useragent can be set without extensions via developer tools in "Network", see attached screenshot.

Another solution is --useagent CLI, I will try to make a script to not rebuild the ubuntu package in my PPA just to allow our managers to work with WhatsApp web. I don't trust 3rd party extensions.

[ali (alparslan)]

Hello, I made a simple extension for this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromium-web-whatsapp-upd/ebhgdpeaajpnjlgjocpmdhlgdajbhjpn