Consider Edge a seperate platform in the generated "info" module

[sebastian]

Background

The info module provides metadata such as the platform, application and their respective versions. For Chrome, Opera and Edge that module is generated from chromeInfo.js.tmpl and the platform is currently hard-coded to "chromium". However, with Edge, this is no longer accurrate.

Also the version given by the Edge/ token in the user agent string, parsed there, refers to the platform (EdgeHTML), not to the application (Edge), unlike for other browsers.

What to change

Change the logic in chromeInfo.js.tmpl so that following info.* properties are initialized like below if the user agent string is indicating Edge:

platform	"edgehtml"
platformVersion	the version given by the Edge/ token in the UA
application	"edge"
applicationVersion	"0"

[sebastian]

The assumptions in the issue description turned out to be wrong; Edge is already using a UA string similar to Chrome. So with the existing code, the current version of Edge will be recognized like that:

{
  application: "edge",
  applicationVersion: "25.10586.0.0",
  platform: "chromium",
  platformVersion: "42.0.2311.135"
}

But one question remains: Do we want to have info.platform set to "chromium" and info.platformVersion to the fake Chrome version given in Edge's user agent string, or should we rather consider Edge a separate platform? Technically, it is a different platform but as far as extension code is concerned not so much. The same holds true for Web Extensions for Firefox. Any thoughts?

[trev]

The engine is called EdgeHTML, that's the platform in this case IMHO (I'd agree to "edge" as well however). The user agent string is irrelevant in that case, the important part is the real technological basis of the browser. Aiming for full Chromium compatibility is great but Edge isn't Chrome. In theory, another browser embedding EdgeHTML should be possible.

[sebastian]

Sounds reasonable to me. But how would you (reliably) detect EdgeHTML other than by relying on the user agent string? The builds for Chrome, Opera and Edge will be compatible with all of these browsers. And we might have only one unified build in the future, anyway. Checking for the chrome namespace would allow to identify Chromium as of now. But since both, Edge and Firefox (Web Extensions), and who knows who else is following, expose the Chrome-like extension API with the browser namespace instead, this doesn't seem to be a good/reliable approach to detect the platform. Neither is there an extension API to detect the actual platform. So it seems the UA string is all we got.

[trev]

I sincerely doubt that, that would be the first browser where the engine cannot be reliably identified by means of JavaScript. Worst-case scenario: window.external && typeof window.external.msTrackingProtectionEnabled == "function".

[oleksandr]

FYI: ​https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/faq/what-is-the-microsoft-edge-user-agent-st/

For some non-interoperable/app-related scenarios, such as extensions, analytics, links to app stores, and pinned sites, you should use the “Edge” token to detect Microsoft Edge

So Microsoft actually recommends using UA.

[sebastian]

It of course depends on what you consider reliable. If checking for non-standard DOM APIs is any better than relying on the user agent string, sure that would be an option. However, as we have to rely on the UA anyway, for the application, applicationVersion and platformVersion, I guess it would be reasonable to rely on it for the platform itself as well, besides that seems to be what Microsoft recommends.

[trev]

This will mostly depend on whether other application embedding EdgeHTML (apps?) will load extensions/use the same user agent string.

[oleksandr]

The EdgeHTML engine that is used in WebView in Universal Windows Platform applications uses the same EdgeHTML version that the Microsoft Edge browser uses. I have checked like described ​here? Those have the same user agent.

[sebastian]

Also we wouldn't be able to correctly detect platformVersion (and potentially application and applicationVersion) anyway if the user agent string is incompatible. Moreover, if we rely on non-standard DOM APIs, it will break if they get removed in the future. So I still think the user agent string is the best we got here.

[sebastian]

​https://hg.adblockplus.org/buildtools/rev/11068a7ccaa8