Devs: BlackBerry 10 Will Have New User Agent

Devs: BlackBerry 10 Will Have New User Agent

Lucas Atkins
By Lucas Atkins on August 16, 2012 at 4:15 pm Filed in News No Comments

Research In Motion has announced that BlackBerry 10 will utilize its own unique User Agent. The company has been hard at work to make BB10′s browser the best in class for HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL. Here’s the new BB10 User Agent and how RIM describes in a blog post how to use it:

Mozilla/5.0 (BB10; <Device Model>) AppleWebKit/<WebKit Version> (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/<BB Version #> Mobile Safari/<WebKit Version>

Explained

  1. Mozilla/5.0 Mostly customary, historically used to indicate Mozilla compatible browser
  2. BB10 The primary identifier of a BlackBerry 10 device
  3. <Device Model> Device product name
  4. AppleWebKit/<WebKit Version> The WebKit Version number
  5. KHTML, like Gecko The engine WebKit originated from
  6. Version/<BB Version #> The software version number
  7. Mobile Indicates the device is mobile; it may have a small physical screen and potentially limited bandwidth
  8. Safari/<WebKit Version> Mostly customary, historically used to indicate Safari-compatible browser

What has changed?

  1. Many websites are filtering on the word “BlackBerry” and providing our very capable browser with the most basic of mobile web pages, while rich content is being pushed to our competitors. To avoid this pitfall, we removed the word “BlackBerry” from our user agent and replaced it with “BB10”. This change will require web administrators to add this new identifier to their user agent detecting scripts
  2. We cleaned up the user agent string by removing both the locale (e.g. “en-US”) and the strong encryption indicator (e.g. “U”) [don’t worry, we still support strong encryption]

Suggested Identification Pattern

  • BlackBerry10 Smartphone: 'BB10' + 'Mobile'

Example: htaccess file

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} BB10.+Mobile 
RewriteRule ^$    http://www.yourawesomesite.com/mobile [L]
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