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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#81

Post by klodolph »

ldng wrote: post #52
_bxg1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

As far as I can tell, HTTP/2 is such a major improvement that no strong-arming is necessary. Speaking as a consumer of the web, as an individual who runs their own website, and at a developer working at a company with a major web presence.

The web suffers a ton from the “red queen” rule in so many different ways anyway—you have to do a lot of work just to stay in the same place.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#82

Post by dhimes »

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…

Please, yes, develop on Firefox first. We all need to promise to do this.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#83

Post by thaumasiotes »

heavyset_go wrote: post #69
thaumasiotes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't quite follow your comment.

I'm saying, the hypothetical flow from Google is:

1. Our Chrome detection relies on the User-Agent header.

2. But people can just lie in the User-Agent header.

3. Let's get rid of it and use something that's harder to lie about.

Closing any feature discrepancy isn't a goal here, as far as I can see. The whole point is to lie to the user that a feature discrepancy exists when it doesn't.

You can make the argument that Google is free to do their browser detection however they want (and therefore doesn't need to solve this problem by eliminating User-Agents), but this is still an obvious example of the User-Agent header causing problems for Google.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#84

Post by spand »

yingw787 wrote: post #74
numpad0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same except it stopped not long ago. Maybe they fixed it ?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#85

Post by mmis1000 »

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...

It actually insert a line break on enter, make it invisible and can't be deleted only on firefox.

Pretend firefox as chrome makes it works perfectly.

They lock the community thread and fixed that after several days I found the finding and post it there.

Shame on you, google.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#86

Post by donatj »

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 good news on that front is that IE11 and non-Chromium versions of Edge will likely never stop supporting UserAgent

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#87

Post by klodolph »

Tyr42 wrote: post #78
klodolph wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, I’m sure there are automated tests. But if you have 50,000 developers using Google Docs in Chrome, they’re gonna submit some high-quality bug reports internally, whenever it breaks.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#88

Post by adrianN »

uk_programmer wrote: post #76
untog wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The other way is not using that feature until all browsers you care about implement it correctly.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#89

Post by sitkack »

heavyset_go wrote: post #69
thaumasiotes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is going to end up being the IE of Google, funny that it is also a browser (Chrome).

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#90

Post by yingw787 »

spand wrote: post #84
yingw787 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same except it stopped not long ago. Maybe they fixed it ?

Maybe. Still not switching away from Firefox though. I have Chrome installed because WebRTC is a lot better and teleconferencing needs have shot up recently, and because I lock my phone away in a Kitchen Safe and use 2FA with Authy the Chrome app, but Firefox is my daily driver :)
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