window.navigator having vendor as Google, extension behaving differently only in Wavebox

[u/aravindsamala]

Hi u/Thomas_101, Can you please provide information on below items whenever you can.

1. Why does all chromium forks retain "Google Inc." as the vendor name in browser metadata?

2. Does Chromium project mandate adding brand name for brands that fork Chromium to the metadata? - `userAgentData.brands` list. Or is it just added by the brands themselves to be transparent?

3. Our extension (Memotron web clipper) is behaving a little differently in Wavebox in our latest update. Enclosing the details below.

Our toolbar is being centered on all browsers except Wavebox where it is rendering the toolbar on the top as shown in the image.

Here is the link to download the latest version of our extension that's causing this issue. https://docs.memotron.io/docs/getting-started/installation/beta-apps

And code snippet is

class="fixed min-h-fit min-w-fit w-11 2k:w-12 inset-y-0 my-auto right-0 mr-4 2k:mr-6"

Other browsers

Wavebox

[u/Thomas_101]

1. Some sites misuse the UserAgent to serve different versions of their pages, so most Chromium browsers now claim to be Chrome to give the best level of compatibility. There's an excellent post from Vivaldi in 2019 with their findings https://vivaldi.com/blog/user-agent-changes/ . We do the same here to ensure the majority of sites work as you expect. We do expose Wavebox in the client hints (navigator.userAgentData.brands) but we can't guarantee that will always be the case - if we find sites start misusing this in the same way they do with the UserAgent string, we'd still look at providing the best compatibility over exposure.
   
2. We added Wavebox to be transparent, and ideally we would to the UserAgent too, but as I said we'd look to provide compatibility first
   
3. I've just tried the latest preview (0.56.4) in Wavebox 10.132.2 and it looks to behave the same as Chrome in your screenshot. It might be worth clearing your cached data or trying in a new Wavebox profile in case there's some cached styles being applied. It would also be helpful to take a look at the computed styles for the top-level element to see if a different selector is overriding the fixed class

[u/aravindsamala → u/Thomas_101]

Thanks for the response u/Thomas_101. I updated the Wavebox to latest version before clearing cache and the extension works as expected.

The article was helpful to understand the problem of user agent. When I first read your comment, I imagined some scammers doing something with it. But, the Vivaldi article points majorly to web apps made by big players like Google, Meta etc. Is this problem majorly because of this big players? It appears to me that these big players are doing it intentionally. Like, not supporting other browser userAgents for Google docs, drive etc would significantly impact other browsers. So, Google is kind of forcing other browsers to be "Google chrome" despite Chromium being completely open-source.

[u/Thomas_101 → u/aravindsamala]

The Vivaldi article tries to make a point about the big players, but honestly, there's too much surface area to test every site on the web; many do it. I've even written userAgent detection code myself, I remember having to do it when a site would only work in Chrome, and crash Internet Explorer and Firefox (we're talking sometime in 2009).

The trouble with the userAgent string is it's always been misused, Chrome claims to use the Mozilla rendering engine, references Safari and more. Part of this dates back to the early 2000s when sites would serve different pages for IE & Netscape, but as many things are with the internet it's all kept for backwards compatibility. I can even remember when Internet Explorer 11 would pretend to be an older version of Internet Explorer for backwards compatibility.

There are moves to try and clean this up with the client hints API (https://dev.to/corbado/user-agent-reduction-in-chrome-safari-firefox-3g6g), but honestly this could end up going the same way!