Designing The Perfect User Agent

[z970]

While experimenting with the idea of a default mobile user agent for PowerUOC, it occurred to me that YouTube changes the way the video is played just by changing the OS' version number. For example, in the excerpt (Linux; Android 2.2), YouTube will try to play the video by offloading it to an external media player, like QuickTime, or VLC. But if you change 2.2 to 4.4 and up, it will simply stream the video through the newer mobile format, with the big playback buttons in the middle, and the gear in the top right.

Interestingly enough though, when it's set to 2.2, Tonvid will stream through the usual desktop-style HTML5 player, and when set to 4.4 and up, it will use the black-style, optionless minimal player also seen in TenFiveTube v2.

And it's not just YouTube. On MSN News, if 2.2 is selected, it will present the headlines in a minimal, lightweight form, albeit stacked vertically for handset viewing. But if an iPad agent running iOS 6 is used, it will present the same format spread out, making it much more suitable for desktop viewing.

But this struck an idea in me... What if we tried to engineer a sort of custom user agent that was deliberately designed to offer the least resource intensive experience for a desktop form factor? It could include a valid tablet flag to tell the website to present the content in a more desktop-friendly manner, and it could include a valid OS version low enough to tell the website to load a stripped-down version of its content. Perhaps it could even raise or lower the browser version to signal the website not to enable all of its advanced features present (at a potential cost of 'your browser is outdated' warnings)...

It would need a base to build from, like Android, or iOS. I'm more inclined to lead toward Android because with Google's past behavior of artificially slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox and Edge, and given their deep-rooted frameworks in most all modern websites, it may be more of a benefit than otherwise. Regardless, it's all still up for debate...

Thoughts?

 

[Dronecatcher]

I went down this route about 2 years ago but couldn't find any online resource to identify the discriminating terms within a user agent - I was hoping for a global naming convention that would specify what video to load for example.
Not having that info I simply tried every UA I could find - easily 100+ and used the ones which were effective. Alas, the changing API meant they were redundant almost within days - and that's been the case ever since.
Now we seem to be stuck between 3gp streaming which has sync issues and HTML5 video that is too demanding at the low end - the sweet spot of 240P mp4 no longer seems available, at least not without either separate audio/video muxing or back to HTML5.
Even the team at the mighty youtube-dl pretend youtube doesn't offer 3gp anymore.

 

[z970]

Now, here's a really good one:

Mozilla/5.0 (Symbian/3; Series60/5.3 NokiaN8-00/111.040.1511; Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1) AppleWebKit/535.1 3gpp--gba

Copied this off my N8 running Delight 6.6, and unlike almost every other mobile UA I've tried, it doesn't break the MacRumors reply box, uses mobile sites that (usually) take less resources, and is rather well supported on most all sites. YouTube will by default try to stream to QuickTime or another media player, but probably not if the "3gpp--gba" is removed. Tonvid will play in HTML5 regardless of "3gpp-gba"'s presence.

Try it out.

 

[z970]

Scratch that... YouTube still plays at 3gp with the trailing parameter removed, and eBay decided to arbitrarily lock out their mobile site because it wasn't a "supported Apple, Android, or BlackBerry".

I swear to god these Web developers...