RIM Smartly Changes BlackBerry 10 Browser User Agent to Improve Browser Detection

 Dev Alpha

RIM had to make the annoying but smart decision to change up the browser agent for BlackBerry 10 devices. This is the user agent that the browser reports to servers. Many websites including BerryReview use this user agent to decide what version of their mobile or desktop site to serve to the device. As some of you may have noticed this has lead to some websites serving extremely low fidelity versions of their website to BlackBerry PlayBooks or BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices. This is because they just check to see if the word BlackBerry is in the user agent.

To fix this RIM has changed the user agent for BlackBerry 10 to say BB10 instead of BlackBerry. The new user agent will look like:

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

Check out RIM’s explanation of the change along with their suggested identification pattern for BlackBerry 10 devices on the dev blog.

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