Captive portal browser/device misreported

[Mark Shuttleworth]

The browser used in the captive portal system is reported as 'Desktop Safari Linux 64'. Could we change this to 'Ubuntu Desktop', please?

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

Added to Trello: https://trello.com/c/dxhWtGV6/241-bug1751484-captive-portal-browser-device-misreported

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I believe the user agent with my pending fix will be

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Safari/605.1.15

Comments
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Websites may still misidentify it as Safari.

I am using a patch from Fedora. They do the same thing we do except with "Fedora" instead of "Ubuntu".

This is also being backported to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 17.10 when we do future webkit2gtk security and feature updates.

Other Browsers
---------------
For reference, Firefox's user agent is
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0

and Chromium's is
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/64.0.3282.167 Chrome/64.0.3282.167 Safari/537.36

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

This is handled by

https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-webkit/webkit.git/tree/debian/patches/user-agent-branding.patch?h=wk2/experimental

and via the 2 USERAGENT lines in debian/rules.

The patch is actually already in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 17.10. It took me some time to figure out the correct syntax in debian/rules to get the user agent override feature working.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package webkit2gtk - 2.19.92-1

---------------
webkit2gtk (2.19.92-1) experimental; urgency=medium

  [ Alberto Garcia ]
  * New upstream development release.
  * debian/rules:
    + Don't redefine CFLAGS or LDFLAGS when calling cmake, and don't add
      CPPFLAGS to CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS. Cmake already reads all those
      environment variables.
  * Build the documentation:
    + debian/rules:
      - Support the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS "nodoc" tag and pass -DENABLE_GTKDOC
        to CMake depending on whether it's set or not.
      - Override the dh_install rule to make sure that a dummy doc
        directory is present if "nodoc" is set.
    + debian/control:
      - Add build dependencies on libglib2.0-doc, libgtk-3-doc and
        libsoup2.4-doc.
      - Update Standards-Version to 4.1.3 (we now support "nodoc").
    + debian/libwebkit2gtk-4.0-doc.install:
      - Install the generated documentation instead of the one provided by
        upstream.
  * debian/copyright:
    + Update copyright years.

  [ Jeremy Bicha ]
  * gstreamergl has moved to gstreamer base in 1.13 so update dependencies
  * Fix Ubuntu useragent (LP: #1751484)
  * Temporarily disable WOFF2 on Ubuntu, see bug 1742743

 -- Alberto Garcia <email address hidden> Wed, 07 Mar 2018 11:18:52 +0200