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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#61

Post by dtech »

tmpz22 wrote: post #55
eh78ssxv2f wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In large corporations politics are abound. If the Chrome division cannot get other divisions to behave through other means, this is fine.

You can see that they should have fought harder and escalated, but issues like this are probably not the ones most upper-middle management want to potentially damage their career for.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#62

Post by liveoneggs »

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.

this is exactly the opposite of what we should do when they degrade experiences of competing browsers!

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#63

Post by numpad0 »

rovek wrote: post #51
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).

I had been having an issue with Google Sheets and Firefox that the app decides to change row height randomly.

On Firefox only. Obvious solution to which being...

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#64

Post by cirno »

derefr wrote: post #40

These days, it feels like the sole use of User-Agent is as a weak defence against web scraping. I've written a couple of scrapers (legitimate ones, for site owners that requested machine-readable versions of their own data!) where the site would reject me if I did a plain `curl`, but as soon as I hit it with -H "User-Agent: [my chrome browser's UA string]", it'd work fine. Kind of silly, when it's such a small deterr…

Checking the user-agent string for scrapers doesn't work anyway. In addition to using dozens of proxies in different IP address blocks, archive.is spoofs its user agents to be the latest Chrome release and updates it often.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#65

Post by true_religion »

jaywalk wrote: post #37
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'm sure Google won't build in some proprietary way for them to identify Chrome. /s

I mean they already did. The goal is to replace user agent parsing with a simple field that says exactly what browser and version this is.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#67

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

Some Google properties are broken on Chromium, even.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#68

Post by diablo1 »

untog wrote: post #15
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.

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.

Related: https://css-tricks.com/freezing-user-agent-strings/

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#69

Post by heavyset_go »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #56
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.

It's the exact opposite. Without User-Agents, sites need to depend on feature detection, and closing the feature discrepancy between Chrome and other browsers is more complicated than just spoofing your UA to get Google to serve you functioning versions of their products.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#70

Post by wolco »

_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…

It is a power move because they use a chrome id to identify you. User agent isn't important to them by very important to others.
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