JGjgraham·Nov 23, 2014
Unfortunately, encouraging people to parse the UA header leads to them getting it wrong in a way that would be amusing if it wasn't so irritating.
For example FirefoxOS has a UA string of the from User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 Mobile Gecko/28 Firefox/32.0'. There's an example in bugzilla of a major site that, not only depends on the file details of that format, but will send the mobile version of the site if and only if the number after Firefox is even and in the range 18 < = x <= 34.
Such examples are not one-offs either. In fact it is so common for sites to screw up here that browser vendors often resort to sending specially crafted UA strings to certain sites in order that the content become accessible. The most extreme example of this was pre-blink Opera which had much better compat than it was given credit for, but was often blocked — acide
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ntially or intentionally — from sites that effectively whitelisted certain browsers. As a result it used an auto-updated list of sites for which it had to send an alternate UA string [1] as well as a sophisticated system of javascript injection to work around more complex bugs in these sites [2].
[1] https://github.com/operasoftware/browserjs/blob/master/deskt...
[2] https://github.com/operasoftware/browserjs/blob/master/deskt...