----- Original Message ----- > On Friday, April 1, 2011 11:38:27 AM UTC-4, Benjamin Smedberg wrote: > > Discussion followup to bug 625238 > > <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625238>. > > Hi, > > After reading through this discussion thread as well as the comments on the > bug report page, I think that there is one reason to expose the running > Android version in the userAgent string that has not been discussed yet. > Consider trying to make a website that closely replicates the look-and-feel > of a native Android app. Correct me if I am wrong, but in order to do this > reasonably well you need to know the running Android version in order to use > an appropriate visual theme, and this cannot be accomplished with media > queries or other standard APIs. > > Suppose further that you were going to develop the website using Google Web > Toolkit (to take advantage of one of the mobile GWT app development > frameworks). In GWT, the deferred binding mechanism is based on browser > sniffing (usually using information extracted from the navigator.userAgent > string, but other snippets of JavaScript can be used as well). You could > define a custom compilation property for the Android version and then bind > an appropriate CssResource, one for each theme, according to the detected > Android version. > > I realize that selecting a theme based on the Android version alone is not > perfect (after all, Android currently provides two system themes, Holo Light > and Holo Dark), but at least it would be a start, and it should be possible > to guess correctly for a majority of the users. Better yet, if the theme > name were somehow included after the Android version, such as "Android 4.3 > Holo Dark", then the website would not need to ask the user for the theme > that he or she is using. In general, I feel that having to ask users for > these pieces of information detracts greatly from the user experience. > > I for one would love to be able to do this, adapt the look-and-feel of a > webpage to the native theme. However, if the user is using Firefox for > Android, then I would have to guess a theme, and I would probably just pick > the latest one. This would be problematic if Google decides to make a major > redesign in the future. > > Would Mozilla consider adding information to the userAgent string to enable > this automatic theme selection technique?
Thank you for sharing your use case. We have been discussing UA use cases on the compatibility@ mailing list. The goal is to better understand the requirements from UA detection that cannot be achieved via other mechanisms. I won't say that changes will be made to the UA, but it is good to list out the requirements for UA detection so that we can work to address deficiencies in our current solution. Lawrence _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
