Consolidate mobile/web browsers

[landenai]

Problem Statement

Currently we classify Chrome Mobile, Chrome Mobile ios, and Chrome as different browsers. This makes for a less than ideal experience when trying to surface user browser data. Is there any reason not to consolidate these as one singular browser? I believe that they are similar enough that this is an arbitrary distinction. Plus they, could still segment the data on OS

Solution Brainstorm

Have singular browser values for Chrome, Safari, etc. regardless of platform.

[linear]

JS-820 Consolidate mobile/web browsers

[Lms24]

Hey @landenai thx for filing! We'll need to discuss this issue first. If we decide to move forward with the proposal, it needs to happen in Relay/Ingest land. The JS SDK doesn't classify the browser tag. Relay extracts this information from the User-Agent header sent from the the device that makes the request to Relay.

I believe that they are similar enough that this is an arbitrary distinction

This distinction isn't completely arbitrary but rather the nature of browsers working quite differently under the hood, even if they're all just called Chrome. For instance:

• Chrome: The normal desktop version of the browser, built on top of Chromium and v8
• Chrome Mobile iOS: The iOS version uses Apple's own rendering engine, Webkit. So chances are high here that behaviour differs in comparison to the regular Chromium/v8 based version of the browser.
• Chrome Mobile: I give you that - I'm not entirely sure about technical differences between desktop and Android versions. The versions are aligned as well since a while. Maybe worth to consolidate indeed.
• Chrome Mobile WebView: This isn't the full browser but rather the view that opens when you click a link inside an app (e.g. instagram).

Plus they, could still segment the data on OS

Yes, indeed. This is worth considering.

I'm not (yet) sure as to how conciously we make the classifications here. My guess is that we just extract what the user agent gives us. Will discuss within our team first and let you know what we decide.

[Lms24]

So we briefly discussed this and there are some things to consider apart from the technical differences between the browsers:

• If we were to make any change here in how we classify user agent/client hint headers to the browser.name tag, this likely breaks anyone who currently has alerts, dashboards or other filters set up for the current change. For instance, if people have alerts around Chrome on iOS or all browsers on iOs.
• You can at least partially filter for all Chrome browsers (just as an example) by querying for browser.name:*Chrome* which the Explore search interprets correctly as a contains query.

Given this, as well as the technical differences, we don't think it makes much sense to pursue this further. Instead, we could think about adding a "browser family" tag, which e..g could classify events to be sent from Chromium, Webkit, Gecko (Firefox), etc. This would allow for a more general query grouping by the underlying browser technology.

@landenai would this solve your request?