Comment 2 for bug 1328183

Thanks for the report Rodney. Getting the default UA string right is a very tricky thing to achieve. We’ve tried several approaches in the past, and there’s no perfect solution. Removing the android token from the default UA usually gets us a very poor UX on most websites and webapps as we are served either desktop content, or WAP pages 'optimized' for the mobile web of the 1990s.

As unfortunate as this situation is indeed, it’s a reality that the vast majority of web content producers assume mobile == (Android || iOS).

Note that we have an override mechanism that allows us to select a different UA string on the fly when talking to certain websites. We can’t abuse this mechanism and ship thousands of overrides though, as it would slow it down noticeably, so we need a default UA that works well enough "out of the box".

Also note that webapps can override their UA too, so each webapp author can pick a suitable UA for the content they target.