Give an option to use a native user agent

[jobbautista9]

This is primarily motivated by the recent addition in Mozilla's terms of use, which is:

You Give Mozilla Certain Rights and Permissions

You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

The language used by Mozilla is not clear, and a worst-case interpretation could mean Mozilla having ownership rights over one's own content just because they used Firefox to upload it. A lot of people are worried about this, and as a result some have moved to forks of Firefox (like Floorp).

However IMO the risk is not significantly reduced this way alone, as the browser returns the same user-agent as vanilla Firefox for each request. A rogue Mozilla could in theory force a user to grant them the ownership rights by pointing at the user-agent; after all the user-agent does say that the user "used Firefox" for uploading the content, even if it could be just a fork of Firefox which has its own branding and distribution independent of Mozilla.

Now, even without the above, I believe Floorp has done enough significant change to the browser compared to vanilla Firefox, and I don't mean the UI but the Mozilla platform code it uses. An example would be the JPEG-XL support. Having our own UA would also mean it would be easier for web browser market analyzers to see how many people are using Floorp, instead of being lumped in with Firefox users. So I think a native UA is warranted.

I propose bringing back the option to change your user-agent from the Settings page (I remember it being there but don't know when it got removed), with one of the options being a unique native user-agent Floorp uses. The native UA would be in this format:

Mozilla/5.0 (<OS bits>; rv:<Firefox ESR version>) Gecko/20100101 Floorp/<Floorp's own version>

For now I manually added general.useragent.override in about:config, but changing the UA every browser update can get old quick, if I can even remember to change the UA every update...

[HyperSoop]

If you're gonna use a nonstandard user agent, do it right. Just return an empty one or none at all or at least something very very minimal.
In this day and age random websites don't need to know the exact version of every user's browser and operating system; this is an excellent opportunity to start normalizing refusing them this information.

[creeper-0910]

If you use Floorp's own UA, one part of the site may not work properly.

[jobbautista9]

I'm fine with that, which is why it's just an option, not the default.

[regularentropy]

The language used by Mozilla is not clear, and a worst-case interpretation could mean Mozilla having ownership rights over one's own content just because they used Firefox to upload it. A lot of people are worried about this, and as a result some have moved to forks of Firefox (like Floorp).

If they wanted to get ownership over your content, the legal wording would be different. In that case, you give them a licence for "help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox". Nothing more.
This is fundamentally different from ownership. Ownership language would include rights to modify, reproduce, publish, distribute, create derivative works, and commercially exploit your content without limitations on purpose or duration.

Now, even without the above, I believe Floorp has done enough significant change to the browser compared to vanilla Firefox, and I don't mean the UI but the Mozilla platform code it uses. An example would be the JPEG-XL support. Having our own UA would also mean it would be easier for web browser market analyzers to see how many people are using Floorp, instead of being lumped in with Firefox users. So I think a native UA is warranted.

Custom User Agent sometimes breaks sites. For example, I've heard that people have been spoofing the user agent on Firefox to Chrome for YouTube to work properly. The only thing it may be useful for is market research.

I propose bringing back the option to change your user-agent from the Settings page (I remember it being there but don't know when it got removed), with one of the options being a unique native user-agent Floorp uses. The native UA would be in this format:

The user agent changer got removed because it caused more issues then it solved. For example, it caused issues with Google Accounts and Cloudflare.
This is the documentation for it: https://docs.floorp.app/docs/issue-tracker/ua