[Solved] My PC is marked as 'Mac' and browser 'webpositive' is marked as 'safari' in my profile

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Why is it? Can’t the site recognize browser as webpositive? Just curious…never owned a MAC, till date

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This is normal expected.

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WebPositive uses webkit, the same rendering engine as Safari, hence the confusion.

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This is because we fake the user agent as safari, partially, not because of webkit.

Yes this probably could be fixed for discuss, but apparently nobody bothered to do so yet?

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I don’t think anyone has owned a MAC, but maybe has owned a Mac instead :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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As @Yann64 has mentioned it’s bc of WebKit

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A little more detailed explanation about how it ended up this way.

The browser sends an identification string known as “user agent”. Normally this should be used only for statistics, but people started using it for all kind of compatibility checks. This results in a lot of problems for all web browsers, and all of them currently try to look like someone else. For example, all current browsers have an user agent starting with Mozilla/5.0 (even if no one is using Mozilla 5, and several of these browsers have not a single line of code from it).

In our case we initially did our own user agent, as a well-behaving browser should do. But then, what happened is that several websites would default to serving us versions of webpages designed for phones instead of desktops, thinking, apparently, that we were some new kind of gadget from Apple.

So we had to make the user agent closer to the one used by Mac computers, to get the same version of websites as they do. It is not perfectly identical, but it is quite close. And since Haiku is small and not very well known, several “browser identification” libraries completely ignore it and happily put us in the “Apple Mac” category. This is not great, but still better than the alternative of getting the wrong version of websites sent to us.

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Here is a sweet-sour explanation too: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

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Thanks for the detailed explanations…very much appreciated

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Just curious
Do the Libre browsers, like Midore, GNU Icecat also do the same thing…for user string?

Midori is much respected in the libre world…

I admire pulkomandy for having taken it upon himself wrt webpositive…before coming to Haiku, I was unaware of these issues,…since things worked in Linux…

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Thanks…edited…initially it will allow me to edit, later, not

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Gnome Web does this I think, not sure if the other browsers do

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They all do some kind of variation on this, yes. Some are popular enough that javascript library to identify the user agent will eventually add code to identify them more precisely.

Some also tend to put as few information as possible in the user agent because having very detailed information would help uniquely identifying each user on a website, and user tracking is not a great thing.