Note: I’m trying to spend time explicitly writing random side projects that are not related to what I’m actively working on as my main project in some form.

A random thread started by Ironholds on a random mailing list I was wearily catching up on contained a joke from bearloga about malformed User Agents. This prompted me to write UAuliver (source), a Firefox extension that randomizes your user agent to be a random string of emoji. This breaks a surprisingly large number of software, I’m told! (GMail & Gerrit being the ones I explicitly remember)

Things I learnt from writing this:

  1. Writing Addons for Firefox is far easier to get started with than they were the last time I looked. Despite the confusing naming (Jetpack API == SDK != WordPress’ Jetpack API != Addons != Plugins != WebExtension), the documentation and tooling were nice enough that I could finish all of this in a few hours!
  2. I can still write syntactically correct Javascript! \o/
  3. Generating a ‘string of emoji’ is easier/harder than you would think, depending on how you would like to define ’emoji’. The fact that Unicode deals in blocks that at least in this case aren’t too split up made this quite easy (I used the list on Wikipedia to generate them). JS’s String.fromCodePoint can also be used to detect if the codepoint you just generated randomly is actually allocated.
  4. I don’t actually know how HTTP headers deal with encoding and unicode. This is something I need to actually look up. Perhaps a re-read of the HTTP RfC is in order!

It was a fun exercise, and I might write more Firefox extensions in the future!