Bug 505287

Summary:	Can you update the user-agent strings for the Falcon browser?
Product:	[Applications] Falkon	Reporter:	Michael McMahon <michael>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Unassigned bugs <unassigned-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	normal	CC:	jurajoravec
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	25.04.2
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:	https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon/-/commit/b995b5b305819539e02e8e2530f3749168309df2	Version Fixed In:	25.08.0
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Michael McMahon 2025-06-06 19:10:34 UTC

Can you update the user-agent strings for the Falcon Browser? One of the common ways that LLM crawlers are hitting sites is to use old browser versions. It appears that Falcon Browser is using old browser versions. I looked and I did not see another issue like this, but it seems to be relevant to konquerer [1] as well. If the user-agent is not going to be kept up-to-date for these projects, it might make sense to make a unique set of Falcon and konquerer user-agents.

[1] https://whatmyuseragent.com/browser/ko/konqueror

If I am reading the following code block correct, it lists these versions:

* Opera 9.8 is from 2008.
* Chrome ummm 87 is from 2021 or Chrome 112 [2] from 2023.
* Safari 10 is from 2017.
* Firefox 102 is from 2022.

Dates are from Wikipedia [3].

[2] https://whatmyuseragent.com/browser/fa/falkon/24

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Web_browsers_by_year

I believe the user-agent strings are in the `falkon/src/lib/preferences/useragentdialog.cpp` file. I believe the code block is this:

```
m_knownUserAgents << QSL("Opera/9.80 (%1) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.16").arg(os)
                      << QSL("Mozilla/5.0 (%1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/%2 Safari/537.36").arg(os, chromeVersion)
                      << QSL("Mozilla/5.0 (%1) AppleWebKit/602.3.12 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0.2 Safari/602.3.12").arg(os)
                      << QSL("Mozilla/5.0 (%1; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0").arg(os);
```

Comment 1 Juraj 2025-06-08 17:23:38 UTC

Hello,

Thank you for checking the UserAgent string.

The default UserAgent is updated according to the QtWebEngine version used.
The "Falkon <version>" part was removed because the modern web did not like it (eg, forever captcha on cloudflare)

You can get more information about QtWebEngine Chromium versions on the official wiki.
https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine/ChromiumVersions

The prefilled selection of UserAgents is not periodically updated, so some older ones are there.
- Opera - may be removed. Good old times.
- Chrome - updates automatically with QtWebEngine;
- Safari - Probably similar to Firefox?
- Firefox - at the time of update it was latest LTS version, shall be kept updated with latest LTS version each Falkon major version release.

Comment 2 Michael McMahon 2025-06-08 22:51:43 UTC

Thank you for providing more information!

The reason I bring this up is because I am still seeing Falcon users use Chrome/87 from 2021 in 2025. Maybe this is due to old LTS distro versions or maybe Falcon is pulling from the "Chromium version" and not the "security patches up to Chromium version" number in qtwebengine.

```
Based on Chromium version:                                      87.0.4280.144
Patched with security patches up to Chromium version:           135.0.7049.95
```

Snippet from https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtwebengine.git/commit/?h=5.15.19&id=a5d11cd6f8c487443c15c7e3a6cd8090b65cb313

Removing Opera is a good move.

(In reply to Juraj from comment #1)
> Hello,
> 
> Thank you for checking the UserAgent string.
> 
> The default UserAgent is updated according to the QtWebEngine version used.
> The "Falkon <version>" part was removed because the modern web did not like
> it (eg, forever captcha on cloudflare)
> 
> You can get more information about QtWebEngine Chromium versions on the
> official wiki.
> https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine/ChromiumVersions
> 
> The prefilled selection of UserAgents is not periodically updated, so some
> older ones are there.
> - Opera - may be removed. Good old times.
> - Chrome - updates automatically with QtWebEngine;
> - Safari - Probably similar to Firefox?
> - Firefox - at the time of update it was latest LTS version, shall be kept
> updated with latest LTS version each Falkon major version release.

Comment 3 Juraj 2025-06-21 08:57:46 UTC

Git commit b995b5b305819539e02e8e2530f3749168309df2 by Juraj Oravec.
Committed on 21/06/2025 at 08:56.
Pushed by jurajo into branch 'master'.

Update UserAgents
FIXED-IN: 25.08.0

Signed-off-by: Juraj Oravec <jurajoravec@mailo.com>

M  +3    -4    src/lib/preferences/useragentdialog.cpp

https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon/-/commit/b995b5b305819539e02e8e2530f3749168309df2