GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 752964
GOA reports itself as Android to Google
Last modified: 2015-10-22 23:33:52 UTC
Created attachment 308307 [details] screenshot Signing in with G-O-A makes Google send you an email saying that you signed in with an Android device, which is pretty far from the truth...
It is because we identify ourselves as Android: https://debarshiray.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/google-mobile-auth-page/ At the moment, dropping the user agent hackery doesn't adversely affect the UI that gets shown, so I am going to remove it from master. However, there is no guarantee what is going to happen in future because it is not in our control.
Created attachment 308413 [details] [review] google: Stop identifying ourselves as Android
Comment on attachment 308413 [details] [review] google: Stop identifying ourselves as Android Pushed to master for the next 3.17.x release.
*** Bug 755622 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Now that we don't identify ourselves as Android, Google will think that we are "Safari on Linux" because that is what the default WebKitGTK user-agent claims to be. On Fedora it looks like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Fedora; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/601.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Safari/601.1 Epiphany uses: Mozilla/5.0 (Fedora; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/601.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Safari/601.1 Epiphany/3.16.2 WebKitGTK would earlier identify itself as Chromium, but that was later changed to Safari. See: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124229 The "Fedora" bit is a downstream patch, tracked at https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142074 Otherwise it would have been "X11". Maybe we can use the same thing as Epiphany? Has anyone got a notification from Google when using it? Does it say "Epiphany on Linux"? I can't figure out how to convince Google to send me a notification. The "recently used device settings" just says Safari. I don't know if it picks up the Epiphany specific part.
Hiya, I just signed in on Epiphany and Google sent me a notification. It just says "Linux". It doesn't say Epiphany anywhere, not even in the Account settings. Cheers, Ankur
(In reply to Ankur Sinha (FranciscoD) from comment #6) > Hiya, > > I just signed in on Epiphany and Google sent me a notification. It just says > "Linux". It doesn't say Epiphany anywhere, not even in the Account settings. > > Cheers, > Ankur When I tried this a couple of days ago, it said "New sign-in from Safari on Linux" This is a Google bug, not a WebKit bug. Sites that do user-agent spoofing are responsible for the inevitable breakage. All WebKit-based browsers (including Chrome!) identify as Safari to improve compatibility with differently-broken web sites. There has been some debate as to whether we should add back Chrome, but we almost have to keep Safari in the user agent either way. Note: since Google has been the biggest offender here, we are thinking about pretending to be Chrome for all google.com domains and only those domains. But that just means you'll get a differently-broken mail.
(In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #7) > When I tried this a couple of days ago, it said "New sign-in from Safari on > Linux" > > This is a Google bug, not a WebKit bug. Sites that do user-agent spoofing > are responsible for the inevitable breakage. Sorry, my brain is only half-on. "Sites that do user-agent parsing" are responsible for the inevitable breakage. It is practically impossible to get this right.