Firefox 16.0.2 advertises User-Agent string with "Firefox/16.0" without the patch-level version
I'm running Firefox 16.0.2 on Mac OS X 10.8.2.
"About Firefox" reports that I'm on the "release"update channel.
The User-Agent string is "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0"
Why does the User-Agent string not say "16.0.2" instead of "16.0"? I know that if I follow a different update channel (like aurora, etc.), I'll get a shortened version-number in my UA string, but since I'm on the "release" update channel, I figured that when I got 16.0.2 the UA string would say "16.0.2".
Note that I've never tried to forge my UA string nor do I have any plug-ins that I can imagine would mutate the UA string.
Modified by chris@christopherschultz.net
All Replies (3)
hello chris, it has been a deliberate decision since firefox 16 not to expose the patch-level of the browser any longer, see bug #728831
Thanks, @madperson... I didn't realize that was for release versions as well. It seems I can no longer force my (internal) users to be up-to-date with Firefox at the patch-level, which is too bad.
I consider the matter settled but if you have any suggestions for how to sniff my user's patch-levels so I can encourage them to upgrade, I'd love to hear some suggestions.
unfortunately i'm not aware of any way to circumvent that - comment 27 in the bug report by a mozilla dev also says that it isn't possible to obtain that information by just looking at the http traffic (and even if there was a fancy way around that it would now apparently be classified as a privacy issue by mozilla and get fixed again as soon as this gets into the public domain)