User-Agent Fix for #441 (#450)

Modified how the user agent is set when sending headers. There were two issues that I was able to identify. First, the Google sign-in page sends requests to the youtube.com domain sometimes, so the existing replacement effect was not always firing. Adding a url entry for this domain fixes this problem. Second, Google sometimes doesn't like the hard-coded user agent this project was previously providing. I have no idea why -- this Electron/user agent/Google problem has been ongoing for years. I've solved this problem this time by instead taking the user agent Electron would have passed by itself and stripping out only the Electron-specific component. I don't know how long this fix will last, since Google seems intent on being opaque about how they determine if a browser is secure or not. Fingers crossed. Co-authored-by: Doc Islands <[email protected]>
OrangeDrangon · Jun 8, 2024 · 528f80c · 528f80c
1 parent f4ab33d
commit 528f80c
Showing 1 changed file with 13 additions and 7 deletions.
diff --git a/src/background.ts b/src/background.ts
@@ -89,21 +89,27 @@ if (gotTheLock) {
       mainWindow.show();
     }
 
-    // set user agent to potentially make google fi work
-    const userAgent =
-      "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/117.0";
-
+    // Fix the user agent -- Google sends auth requests to YouTube as well, for some reason
     mainWindow.webContents.session.webRequest.onBeforeSendHeaders(
       {
-        urls: ["https://accounts.google.com/*"],
+        urls: ["https://*.google.com/*", "https://*.youtube.com/*"],
       },
       ({ requestHeaders }, callback) =>
         callback({
-          requestHeaders: { ...requestHeaders, "User-Agent": userAgent },
+          requestHeaders: {
+            ...requestHeaders,
+            // Specifically, we are ONLY removing the Electron portion of the agent
+            // Found via https://old.reddit.com/r/electronjs/comments/eiy2sf/google_blocking_log_in_from_electron_apps/fcvuwd9/
+            // Referenced at this link https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk/issues/2478#issuecomment-571773318
+            "User-Agent": mainWindow.webContents.userAgent.replace(
+              "Electron/" + process.versions.electron,
+              ""
+            ),
+          },
         })
     );
 
-    mainWindow.loadURL("https://messages.google.com/web/");
+    mainWindow.webContents.loadURL("https://messages.google.com/web/");
 
     trayManager.startIfEnabled();
     settings.showIconsInRecentConversationTrayEnabled.subscribe(() =>