True, Google's transcoder changes the User-Agent, but are they also doing the right thing? (Your reasoning that they must be doing right because they "don't do evil(TM)" is as lame as it can be) You have to consider the context. They are are a third party transcoder. Users are free not to use it. A user is not forced to use it either. You will run into it most likely when you do a search and desktop search results. That google is transcoding is seen very clearly in the URL. In the bottom, there is a link "Page adapted for mobile phone. View in HTML." where the user can just get out of the transcoder easily. Besides, their mobile search engine is smart enough to know which are mobile sites and which are not. Apparently, if Google knows that a site can handle mobile browsers directly, it won't send it through the Transcoder. Try this for yourself: http://www.google.com/xhtml/search?mrestrict=xhtml&q=cnn

Whereas Vodafone is changing the User-Agent no matter what, unless the site is on their "white list." Since ALL user using their provisioned phones has to go through their gateway, they are in a position to abuse them. When you access a site, you may see that the URL you are accessing is, say http://mobile.wsj.com/ , but the content you see may have been the result of the Vodafone transcoding what Wall Street Journal returns for PCs, not what Wall Street Journal wants you to see on mobile.

And the Ad hominem attack is really unjustified. Not all sites use WURFL mind you. And citing WURFL is really beside the point. The User-Agent string is what all these mobile sites primarily use to identify the device, whether they use WURFL or not.

Can Vodafone subscriber's override the Whitelisted URLs by a specific or any combination of personal preferences settings?

My concern is that if the Whitelist can be overridden:

1. the User-Agent string will again be hidden from Whitelisted URLs
2. sites/services are again unable to provide optimized experience/content
3. resulting with the subscriber unknowingly opting out of the intended and appropriate experience
[/quote]

@ Brian.

Can you or someone else answer the question above?[/quote]

Morning David

Thanks for your question.

The whitelist cannot be bypassed by user settings.
BR
Brian

Having watched this debate since first receiving calls from mobile industry customers saying 'Vodafone UK seems to be broken', and subsequently porting out my VF smartphone on the 8th June (I wanted web so I walked) there are a few points yet to be made.

While I recognise the arguments about user experience and the desire to offer a service, the imposition of this service is rather ungainly to say the least. Suggestions of a 'web experience' are not helpful: this transcode proxy certainly hasn't given my phone a right click or the ability to support AJAX from the browser, and the marketing suggestion of 'The Internet is now mobile' doesn't help. Presumably the intent was to suggest that the internet becoming mobile meant freedom and choice and all the internet things; it actually means the mobile version: restricted, clunky, interfered with, etc.

There is an underlying reason for transcoding I suggest, and it's nothing to do with user experience. In other countries - where mobile internet has really taken off - passing details about handsets, browsers, unique identifiers and so on has a value to the service providers. Where the operators pass these parameters, they are permitting service markets to flourish through access to a wide eco-system, and the network operators gain from increased traffic. By restricting these parameters, network operators can carve out a future market for themselves: if only they know the MSISDN, IMEI, location, browser type, MVNO id, and anything else that can be held back, just think of the advertising CPM premium that can be commanded over an external party. Topping and tailing web pages is an insurance policy for this approach: getting users familiar with seeing pages of a certain layout is the precursor to advert injection. Transcoding out anything that looks like a third party advert removes the competition too.

So I think I can see what's happening here. I just hope there is a U-turn as I'd prefer my mobile internet to be unadulterated: I want my UA string too.

While you're working on that, making it as fast on the network as it is on WLAN would be nice too. [That iPhone really doesn't look as daft as I first thought... and I still don't like garden walls].

I haven't read through this entire thread as it is too long, but I'd like to say that it's even worse than it appears.

You see, the Novarra content reformatting system doesn't even work anyway.

I am an avid reader of Wikipedia and I often read it on my mobile phone. It was always nicely sized and very readable. Then suddenly last week I started receiving the FULL SIZED desktop version on my phone! It was almost totally unreadable. Some further examination after reading about the reformatting showed that it was not quite the desktop version but some bastardised half mangled version of the desktop version, presumably Novarra's attempt at "reformatting."

So I tried going to the Vodafone website (again on my phone, a Sony Ericsson W950i) to turn off the resizing after reading about it and what do I get? A BLANK PAGE. Nothing. Zip.

The sheer incompetence of the whole thing is quite simply astonishing. And from a huge company that really should know better.

Disgusting. I signed up for this forum specifically so that I could vent how I feel about this nonsense.

As it does not appear that VF is going to back down from this plan, I have a suggestion to make. Instead of the current whitelist approach, which requires manual intervention on both sides (the developers and presumably VF staff), an alternate method of doing similar would be to have a fixed absolute URL on a site. Before VF transcodes the site, it will check for the existance of that URL, and if found, will not transcode (caching the fact of existance of this URL is optional, but encouraged). Only if the URL doesn't exist, will any transcoding be done.

This has the following benefits (IMO :) :

1/ minimal effort required on the developers part
2/ only a one-time effort on VF's part, to develop the lookup code
3/ customers get the benefit of an optimised site; If the developer indicates that it has been optimised by the presence of this URL, and the current transcoding behaviour if not
4/ still allows VF to offer the choice to customers as to whether to do the transcoding, whilst also giving developers a chance to opt-out of having their site transcoded

If, as was previously mentioned, other operators are looking at adopting this technology also, then the current whitelist behaviour could become a maintainence nightmare for developers, as they would presumably need to request being added to the whitelist for each and every operator; That's not too big a problem when there are one or two operators doing it, but imagine if every operator in every country ended up doing this... If all operators followed the same behaviour, of checking for the existance of this URL, that would simplify things for both the operators and the site developers.

Mark.

Hi all,

After all user-agent modification issue in this thread, the only understandable reason to hide user-agent header I have read so far is the "mobile blocking" policy that some sites use in their client access control.

I can understand this "mobile-blocking-site" reason as a mean to provide Vodafone customers with all internet content out-there, and even a valuable efford.

But... what kind of "mobile-blocking-sites" problem is Vodafone attempting to solve hiding the real device user-agent, but sending it under a different header id?

If any provider consciously block mobile access to a site, but he can "identtify the handset used to make the original request" through x-Device-User-Agent header... don't you think he will use that header to block AGAIN any mobile access to the site...?

Best Regards

greg

Hi,

I am the mobile Engineer at Wadja.com (m.wadja.com). I am also a Vodafone Greece mobile subscriber.

I am also experiencing this kind of (re)formatting on all sites accessed through my Vodafone internet enabled device.

I got this user-agent: Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini; en; U; ssr),[note, this is not my user-agent, as i am using a netFront browser] and I have tried the above quoted text, ie wap.wadja.com, and this has not made any difference either.

This is very interesting, because it seems that this is becoming a global Vodafone effort. What is odd is that Vodafone networks in different countries do not seem to be playing by the same rule book. I also do not have an option to disable, as is done in the UK.

This makes mobile development not difficult, but impossible, as it leaves it open to interpretation by regional Network Operators.

OK, so this effort is allowing everyday users access the internet through their mobile, but in one sweep it is single-handedly destroying an already struggling mobile internet.

It seems incredible that the topic of discussion here is how to the get the user-agent to the developer. I believe, that we should be discussing a way that the developers can embrace this technology, because lets face it, it's not going away, and i think that it's a rather good idea as well.

Url's containing wap.domain.com or white lists is not a solution. I think that a response header should be agreed upon, that a developer can set so that his/her mobile site is formatted or not. Something similar to robots.txt that search engines use.

Hi Luca

Vodafone is delivering the service that they are marketing to their customers.

See
Vodafone Online

That is a PC experience on their phones.

The PC experience is the default experience.

BR
Brian[/quote]

The PC experience has lots of different possible user agents. I'd be pretty upset if all my javascript stopped working because someone in the middle changed the user agent of my pc browser.

How is changing the user agent required to fulfill any of the goals of the proxy?