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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#71

Post by currysausage »

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…

If you have the new Chromium-based Edge ("Edgium") installed: the compatibility list at edge://compat/useragent is really interesting.

Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn't.

[Edit] Here is the full list: https://pastebin.com/YURq1BR1

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#72

Post by rocky1138 »

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…

Facebook also uses the user-agent string to determine which version of a site to send to someone. I installed a user-agent spoofer a while back and messenger.com would fail due to it every few refreshes (as evidenced by JS console).

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#73

Post by klodolph »

untog wrote: post #59
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.

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.

I’m guessing all of Google’s internal apps are only tested on Chrome, with plenty of Chrome extensions, which means that all of the developers have to use Chrome to make the tools work, and at that point, switching back and forth between different browsers is a pain so none of the other browsers get the love they deserve.

The attitude of “it works on Chrome, I don’t care about anything else” is fairly widespread anyway. Just to stem the tide a little bit I’ve been developing on Firefox and Safari first, and then checking Chrome last.

I got bitten before when I made a browser game, and then noticed that it was all sorts of broken on Edge, even though Edge supposedly had all the features I needed. It turns out that Edge did have all the features I needed, but I had accidentally used a bunch of Chrome features I didn’t need. The easy way out is to turn things off when I detect Edge. The hard way is to find all the broken parts and fix them. So nowadays, I don’t do any web development in Chrome.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#74

Post by yingw787 »

numpad0 wrote: post #63
rovek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Oh wait...THAT might be the problem?? I've been having that issue too! I have to cut the cell content, delete the cell, and then paste the cell content back in in order for the row height to appear the same. It never even occurred to me to switch browsers, I thought it was an issue with Google Sheets.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#75

Post by rocky1138 »

nerdponx wrote: post #54
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.

The problem with services using the user-agent to determine whether or not to allow a client access to a resource outweighs any benefit. I'm in the "it was a mistake to include this in the spec" camp.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#76

Post by uk_programmer »

untog wrote: post #58
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 snif…

The problem is that without User Agent sniffing in some circumstances there is no other way of working round a browser bug e.g. There are cases where browsers will report that it supports such feature using one of the feature checks but the implementation is garbage. The only way is to have a work around based on user-agent sniffing.

Sure a lot of developers abuse the feature but I fear this might create another set of problems.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#77

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

numpad0 wrote: post #63
rovek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> Obvious solution to which being...

Installing an extension to spoof your user agent? Since we wouldn't want to reward Google being anti-competitive.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#78

Post by Tyr42 »

klodolph wrote: post #73
untog wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m guessing all of Google’s internal apps are only tested on Chrome, with plenty of Chrome extensions, which means that all of the developers have to use Chrome to make the tools work, and at that point, switching back and forth between different browsers is a pain so none of the other browsers get the love they deserve. The attitude of “it works on Chrome, I don’t care about anything else” is fairly widespread anyw…

At least in my part of the googleverse, we have automated tests running in all the browsers (even ie11).

But I'll admit I will also poke around outside of the tests, and I'll usually only be doing that in chrome, unless I've had a bug report about firefox in particular. And I'll only really open up Safari when I'm testing VoiceOver. ChromeVox just isn't good enough.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#79

Post by rozab »

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 know Netflix used to block the Firefox on Linux user agent for no reason

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#80

Post by Avamander »

snazz wrote: post #26
timw4mail wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript-only is not an upgrade.

UA strings have never been an accurate indication. If you're not using JS, then you probably have no reason to be sniffing the UA string to detect browser features, since most of those features are JS-related anyway. It's an upgrade for the people who actually need to get an indication of the supported features and APIs of the user's browser. Otherwise, you should be using media queries.

Detecting dumb search crawlers, that don't support major features required for my webapp, and displaying a fallback splash has been the only reasonable way I've found.
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