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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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11–20 of 329 posts

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#11

I was wondering. Isn't the page rendered on mobile and desktop based on user-agents? How would that work now?

Not usually, no. CSS media queries are used to format according to display size. But as a sibling here has indicated, client hints will replace the user agent here.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#13

As usual, this will fuck up the users, and not the techy nerds making such decisions, but the average joe because things on the internet will be broken for them.

This last year I've been noticing things breaking on the Internet for me here and there. I'm a Firefox user. This really wasn't the case in most of the past decade.

This kinda reminded me of the late 00's. It was quite common that the odd government or enterprise website was IE6 only.

All hail the new IE6.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#14

I was wondering. Isn't the page rendered on mobile and desktop based on user-agents? How would that work now?

I thought it used Javascript to detect screen size. At least it should react to resize events and if the dimensions are something that align with mobile, it should switch to mobile mode.

AFAIK it's also done using CSS

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#15

As usual, this will fuck up the users, and not the techy nerds making such decisions, but the average joe because things on the internet will be broken for them.

How will things be broken? Google is not removing the user agent, they're just freezing it. So all sites that currently depend on the user agent will continue to do just fine. New sites can use client hints instead, which are a much more effective replacement for user agent sniffing.

This solution very specifically places the burden on "techy nerds" and not users, so I'm not sure where you're coming from.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#16

As usual, this will fuck up the users, and not the techy nerds making such decisions, but the average joe because things on the internet will be broken for them.

Seems they considered this issue and created a work-around:

>While removing the User-Agent completely was deemed problematic, as many sites still rely on them, Chrome will no longer update the browser version and will only include a unified version of the OS data.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#17
post #13

As usual, this will fuck up the users, and not the techy nerds making such decisions, but the average joe because things on the internet will be broken for them.

This last year I've been noticing things breaking on the Internet for me here and there. I'm a Firefox user. This really wasn't the case in most of the past decade. This kinda reminded me of the late 00's. It was quite common that the odd government or enterprise website was IE6 only. All hail the new IE6.

I use Safari with no plugins. Even Disney World has a broken website for buying tickets for me. The web is breaking because it's gotten way too complex and the fight against trackers is leading to random failures of things that used to work.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#18

I was wondering. Isn't the page rendered on mobile and desktop based on user-agents? How would that work now?

The typical way this is done these days is by media queries in CSS, so you'd write a rule for styling based on screen width, like

        @media (max-width: 550 px) {
           body {
              background-color: white;
           }
        }
turns the background white on small screens.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This last year I've been noticing things breaking on the Internet for me here and there. I'm a Firefox user. This really wasn't the case in most of the past decade. This kinda reminded me of the late 00's. It was quite common that the odd government or enterprise website was IE6 only. All hail the new IE6.

I use Safari with no plugins. Even Disney World has a broken website for buying tickets for me. The web is breaking because it's gotten way too complex and the fight against trackers is leading to random failures of things that used to work.

The web is breaking because we are reaching the point where developers are able to assume WebKit/Blink and get away with it. It is imperative that technical folk adopt Firefox to hold back the tide.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#20
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This last year I've been noticing things breaking on the Internet for me here and there. I'm a Firefox user. This really wasn't the case in most of the past decade. This kinda reminded me of the late 00's. It was quite common that the odd government or enterprise website was IE6 only. All hail the new IE6.

I use Safari with no plugins. Even Disney World has a broken website for buying tickets for me. The web is breaking because it's gotten way too complex and the fight against trackers is leading to random failures of things that used to work.

Which is a shame, but I would lay the blame squarely at the feet of the team who built a checkout that throws errors when their analytics events don't fire. QA should really include a manual run w/ an adblocker...
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