Understanding User Agents in the MaaS360 Secure Browser

I was recently asked by a customer what type of Browser the MaaS360 Secure Browser is built upon or emulates so that the customer’s developers can design their web sites accordingly. To provide this information you must examine the browser’s user agent string (UA) which helps identify which browser is being used, what version, and on which operating system.

By default, the browser is called the Mobile Safari v10.

The complete UA is

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 10_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.2.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14B100 Safari/9537.53

However, this is because the setting “Use Safari user agent” is switched on within the browser. If you look at the image below you can access the settings via the 3 vertical dots in the browser itself. safari-settingIf this setting is turned off the name of the Browser is identified as WebKit v602.2.14 and the Safari string is removed.

i.e.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 10_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.2.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/14B100

This string can be manipulated manually by modifying your active WorkPlace Persona Policy (under Browser->Defaults) and checking the Override User Agent setting. This give you 2 options for iOS and Android. In the example below I have changed the User Agent String to %deviceid%.

policy_change_1This wipes all the standard details and purely displays the ID. In this case ApplF6QR601FG5VW.

Therefore, if you wish to maintain the standard string (%standard%) and add to it with your own string you can do something like the following.

policy_change_2This changes the User Agent String to

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 10_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.2.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/14B100 orb-data

And identifies the browser as WebKit v602.2.14. Note that even with the Use Safari user agent setting turned on the safari information is lost.

Visits: 111