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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#51

Post by rovek »

jorams wrote: post #36

The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user age…

I had been thinking recently as I've been using Firefox more that Google maps had got clunky. With a little fiddling prompted by your comment, it turns out Maps sniffs specifically to reduce fluid animations on Firefox (and probably some other browsers).

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#52

Post by ldng »

_bxg1 wrote: post #34
ldoughty wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but this also is incredibly dependent on the major players (e.g. Google) not going off on their own making changes without agreement from other browsers... There are still issues today where chrome, edge, and Firefox render slightly differently. I certainly agree user agent isn't terribly necessary, but it's literally the only hook to identify when css or JavaScript needs to change... Or to support people on…

Thinking cynically, it could be a power-move by Google to strengthen their hold on the ecosystem. Right now when they go out and make their own API changes without consensus (which already happens), it's possible to distinguish the "for Chrome" case and still support the standard. But if there were no User-Agent, and Google wanted to strongarm the whole group into something, and 90% of browsers are Chromium-based, de…

You mean, like SPDY/HTTP2 ?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#53

Post by chrisfinazzo »

jt2190 wrote: post #38
olsonjeffery wrote: post #33

At my employer we are using UserAgent to detect the browser so that we can drive SameSite cookie policy for our various sites (e.g. IE11 and Edge, which we still support, doesn't support SameSite: None). There are a variety of scenarios where this comes up (e.g. we ship a site that is rendered, by another vendor, within an iframe; so we have to set SameSite: None on our application's session cookie so that it's valid…

The proposed User Agent Client Hints API would replace this: https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/

Going way back to the original iPhone Web Apps session at WWDC in 2007, they specifically cautioned about the problem of sniffing UA strings.

Of course, the reality of the web meant they had to do a bunch of compatibility hacks to get pages to display well.

(Gecko appeared in the original Safari on iPhone UA, IIRC)

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#54

Post by nerdponx »

ravenstine wrote: post #27

This is a good idea, and is something I've thought of for a while; the user agent header was a mistake from both a privacy and a UX perspective. Ideally, web browsers should attempt to treat the content the same no matter what device you are on. There shouldn't be an iOS-web, and a Chrome-web, and a Firefox-web, and an Edge-web; there should just be the web. In which case, a user-agent string that contains the browse…

I don't know.

If I'm connecting to a site with Lynx, I sure as heck don't want them to try to serve me some skeleton HTML that will be filled in with JS. Because my browser doesn't support JS, or only supports a subset of it.

User Agent being a completely free form field is the real mistake IMO. Having something more structured, like Perl's "use" directive, might have been better.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#55

Post by tmpz22 »

eh78ssxv2f wrote: post #39
jorams wrote: post #36

The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user age…

Google is probably so big that we might as well consider Chrome and rest of the Google as separate entities.

I’ve started seeing alphabet employees use this as an excuse: “oh that happened on team x there’s nothing I could’ve done”. On small technical issues the excuse is fine - on large moral issues it does not work.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#56

Post by thaumasiotes »

jorams wrote: post #36

The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user age…

> They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent.

This seems like a pretty good reason in itself why they might be interested in phasing out User-Agents.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#57

Post by lovehashbrowns »

keyme wrote: post #13
gregoriol wrote: post #4

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 had Build-A-Bear not work for me on Firefox at the checkout process. Had to switch to Chrome to make the purchase. But aside from that, I typically don't see any issues.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#58

Post by untog »

vxNsr wrote: post #44

> https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints I don't really understand how this will result in any real difference in privacy or homogeneity of the web. Realistically every browser that implements this is gonna offer up all the info the server asks for because asking the user each time is terrible UX. Additionally this will allow google to further segment out any browser that doesn't implement this because they'll ask f…

> I don't really understand how this will result in any real difference in privacy or homogeneity of the web.

It does a little: sites don't passively receive this information all the time, instead they have to actively ask for it. And browsers can say no, much like they can with blocking third party cookies.

In any case I'm not sure privacy is the ultimate goal here: it's intended to replace the awful user agent sniffing people currently have to do with a sensible system where you query for what you actually want, rather than infer it from what's available.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#59

Post by untog »

eh78ssxv2f wrote: post #39
jorams wrote: post #36

The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user age…

Google is probably so big that we might as well consider Chrome and rest of the Google as separate entities.

You can see Chrome devrels on Twitter expressing disappointment with Chrome-only web sites, saying that they raise the issue internally. Of course we have no visibility into what happens after that, but it's an indicator that you're right.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#60

Post by jacobr1 »

eric_b wrote: post #42

This feels very ivory tower. It reminds me of the "You should never need to check user agent in JavaScript because you should just feature detect!!". Well in the real world that doesn't work every time. The same is true for server side applications of user-agent. There are plenty of non-privacy-invading reasons to need an accurate picture of what user agent is visiting. And a lot of those applications that need it ar…

Chrome will support the legacy apps by maintaining a static-user agent. It just won't be updated when chrome updates. If you want to build NEW functionality that where you need to test support for new browsers, you do that via feature detection.
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