UA Profile and Accept headers for S60 3rd Ed. FP 1 Browser

[Nokia Ron]

This note outlines the HTTP header strings sent by the Nokia Web Browser included in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 and it provides some recommendations for web content owners. Another note outlines the HTTP headers used by the browsers included in S60 3rd Edition.

This note operates with two concepts for which there exist no unique industry terms. Therefore, the term "full Web" denotes web pages written to be consumed on devices with large screens such as PCs. The term "traditional mobile browsing" refers to web pages specifically constructed for small screen devices such as mobile phones using XHTML-MP or WML.
- - - - - - - -

Web sites use HTTP headers received from the browser to decide what kind of content to send: WML (WAP 1.x), XHTML-MP (WAP 2.0), HTML (full Web).
The Nokia Web Browser, which started shipping with S60 3rd Edition, is capable of displaying full Web pages; a feature users like. However, to users' disappointment some web sites force redirect to mobile web sites based on XHTML-MP or WML and some search engines force transcoding of resulting sites through their proxy. Nokia highly recommends that users be allowed to decide whether to accept traditional mobile format, which can be faster, or accept full web pages, which generally offers a richer and more familiar experience (see further recommendation below).

In S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 the Nokia Web browser is the only browser included. All invocation of a browser will launch this browser. The browser now supports:
Full Web (HTML, CSS, ECMAScript / JavaScript)
WAP 1.x (WML)
WAP 2.x (XHTML-MP with WCSS and ECMAScript-MP)
Some cHTML and operator-specific extensions.

The following document the HTTP headers used:
- User-Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaXxx/1.0; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413
- When requesting HTML: Accept:
text/html,text/css,multipart/mixed,application/java-archive, application/java, application/x-java-archive, text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor, application/vnd.oma.drm.message, application/vnd.oma.drm.content, application/vnd.oma.dd+xml, application/vnd.oma.drm.rights+xml, application/vnd.oma.drm.rights+wbxml, */*
- When requesting CSS: Accept: text/css
- When requesting ECMAScript/JavaScript: Accept: */*
- When requesting images: Accept: */*
- Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8; q=0.7, *; q=0.7
- Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, x-gzip, identity; q=0.9
- Accept-Language: en
- x-wap-profile: "http://nds1.nds.nokia.com/uaprof/N3250r100.xml"

** See also Notes below **

Recommendations:
Web sites should ideally send full HTML to this browser, and not default to XHTML-MP or WML. Search engines and operators should not transcode Web sites into XHTML-MP or WML.
Nokia believes S60 users will generally prefer to see full Web pages rather than basic mobile pages. However, there are times when mobile content is preferred because it is faster and simpler to navigate, and/or for business/advertising reasons. When the mobile page provides a good user experience on S60, it may make sense to redirect users to the mobile page by default.
Nokia recommends providing users a choice between full Web and traditional mobile web. Restricting S60 users from accessing full web content is highly undesirable and strongly advised against. Instead users should be provided a choice between the two and preferably the choise should be made "sticky" via a cookie freeing the user from constantly having to switch between the two formats.
Examples for user choice:
- Switch to: mobile | full page
- Change view: mobile | desktop
- View: mobile | HTML
- View: faster | richer

Notes:
The device name/version (e.g. "NokiaE60/4.06.0") is replaced by the actual device name/version
"Series60/3.0" is replaced by the actual S60 version, e.g. "Series60/3.1"
"[en-us]" or "en" is replaced by the current user-selected language in the phone settings (e.g. "[fi]" or "fi" for Finnish), dynamically changing if user changes language settings. For English "[en-us]" or "en-us" will be dropped in favor of "[en]“ or "en". In 3.1 the language is no longer be included in the User-Agent header, rather it is in the Accept-Language header, without square brackets
The x-wap-profile value "http://nds1.nds.nokia.com/uaprof/N3250r100.xml" (including the " characters) is replaced by the link to the actual profile for the particular device and version, provided by the particular device program.
There is a future possibility that some devices will remove the Java Profile version & Nokia device version, and will refer to user-agent profile instead.

Algorithm for determining which content type to send to Nokia devices:
if (User-Agent contains "AppleWebKit")
{
if (User-Agent contains "SymbianOS")
    <<< use full HTML version (a phone with WebKit engine)
else
    <<< use full HTML version (Apple Safari)
}
else if (User-Agent contains "Nokia")
{
<<< use XHTML version (old S60 "Services" browser or Series 40 browser)

[anpavisi]

Full tech specs for all of the nokia phones, including all user-agent variations can be found at http://gnumobile.com/wurfl/Nokia_index.php

fyi.

[lenclud]

The code I was using to launch the web browser on a specified URL on S60 3rd MR SDK just won't work on FP1. Did they change the web browser UID?

[glombnk]

Ron nice information’s can any Web Hosting Provider make their site accessible through Wap.

[Nokia Ron]

Ron nice information’s can any Web Hosting Provider make their site accessible through Wap.

Yes they can

[idel.fuschini@gmail.com]

Hi,
I try to access to this URL: http://gnumobile.com/wurfl/Nokia_index.php
But my browser (firefox) say that the site is malicious