Why does the Firefox User Agent String still say X11 when the truth is Wayland
I'm running Firefox under Ubuntu, Ubuntu is using Wayland which replaced X11.
Firefox's User Agent string still refers to X11, this does not cause me any problem but I'm curious.
I realise some websites might be expecting to see "X11" and could get upset if presented with "Wayland" instead but in various walks of life telling the truth is often the best policy.
about:support in Firefox shows me:
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:152.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0 Window Protocol wayland
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You can customize your own user agent header if you're so inclined. (Ubuntu does it as well as you can see yourself — the "Ubuntu" bit is not there from Mozilla in the "factory" distribution…)
I realise some websites might be expecting to see "X11" and could get upset if presented with "Wayland"
Spot on. Exactly; starting with your favorite search engines and ecommerce operators etc.
There's just too much things running on the internet today that won't ever get updated again, and will never learn any of these new values. So it's better to leave that alone.
telling the truth is often the best policy
Not on the internet for anyone listening in, no. For privacy reasons, these values ceased to be updated some time ago, and now do not represent the users' systems. (32 bit or ARM all show up as x64; BSD systems claim to be Linux; iPads are telling they are Intel Mac OS X from last decade.)
The current compatibility specification shows that in more detail: https://compat.spec.whatwg.org/#ua-string-firefox
I perhaps didn't link the best place with tokens +description for e.g. the unified platform above it, but that section basically shows that no matter the device used, the user agent only ever reports with a per–platform constant that is one of the following values:
"Linux; Android 10; K" "Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64" "Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7" "X11; Linux x86_64"
and similar.
The example of lowering entropy and improving interoperability was e.g. bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=277368 following bugzilla.mozilla.org/1861847 if you want to see some rationale and historic decisions out of curiosity.
Even before Mozilla dropped support of 32-bit Linux starting Firefox 145.0 and later the UA on 32-bit systems was showing for a long time as if they had 64-bit Linux. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-has-ended-support-32-bit-linux
Mozilla has been making parts of the UA more generic for a long time now. The minor updates versions has not been shown in UA since Firefox 16.0.2? for example. People think the Windows 11 Firefox users are showing as if they have Windows 10 due to this however the real reason is due to Windows 11 being based on same NT 10.0 as Windows 10.
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