Seeking a Practical Way to Change the User Agent in WebPositive

Hello everyone,

How do you change the User Agent of WebPositive?
I am having issues with the current one. For instance, an incorrect user agent seems to result in Zoom (zoom.us) to not load, period, in Haiku Beta 2’s WebPositive; Zoom states that the operating system is unsupported.

Note: I am not interested in using a different web browser, only WebPositive. It is the most reliable on my install of Haiku.

Is there a configuration file that I must edit in the Haiku installation, or is the User-Agent compiled into the WebPositive binary? And if the latter, what is the file that I must modify in the source to yield a different user agent upon compilation?

Thank you in advance for your help!

1 Like

Currently it’s not possible to change it. User agent sniffing is a bad practise and web developers shouldn’t be doing that. But I guess we have no choice if we want some things to work (I think Zoom will not be very useful since WebPositive will not support audio and video input however, and possibly not even output in this case).

In WebKit there is a list of user agent “quirks”, that is, for specific website a different user agent is sent when they are known to need it. However, it is not yet used in the Haiku version of WebKit. Anyone wants to submit a patch adding that?

3 Likes

Thank you, I very much appreciate your response. I agree, the webpage-specific user-agent change feature should be added.

Although for now, when compiling a custom version of HaikuWebKit from GitHub, how would one change the hard-coded user agent? Which file(s) in the source contain(s) the user-agent, so that I could modify them prior to compilation on my machine?

Anyone had any luck recently running Zoom on in WebPositive?
*(I would be content even if I could get audio only)

I don’t need to use Zoom but did you try the Otter browser? I’m often switching between both browsers and at the end I get most things working.