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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#91

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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 would guess they have built something into chrome that gets even more data that isn't user-agent based.

UA has a lot of limitations and is fairly easy to work around giving data to for power users. I would imagine Google didn't want to keep playing around with that.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#92

Post by jeroenhd »

rozab wrote: post #79
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

Not for a technical reason, but they had a reason: they provided no support or guarantee that Netflix would ever work on Linux + FF (Ubuntu + Chrome was guaranteed) and they didn't want any support calls for something that they wouldn't help people with anyway.

A lot of stuff gets blocked for this reason. The company doesn't want you calling them because HD video doesn't work on Firefox even though you pay for HD quality, they do not test or guarantee Firefox compatibility in the slightest and yet they have to talk to an angry customer now. It makes business sense to redirect people to supported use cases when you know your product probably won't work as intended otherwise.

You don't have to agree with the decision (and you can always cancel your membership if you do) but they had their reasons.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#93

Post by superkuh »

User-agent is super useful to human people. But corporate people don't have a use for it. They will get that information via running arbitrary code on your insecure browser anyway. So, because mega-corps now define the web (instead of the w3c) this is life.

But it doesn't have to be. We don't have to follow Google/Apple-Web standards. Anyone that makes and runs websites has a choice. And every person can simply choice not to run unethical browsers.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#95

Post by daveFNbuck »

blitmap wrote: post #41
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 hear what you're saying, but they pay people enough to follow a potential company-wide policy: Don't f-ck with user agents!

It's easier to change the thing you're in charge of than it is to make a new company-wide policy.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#96

Post by manigandham »

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…

That requires running Javascript instead of having a server-side call.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#97

Post by manigandham »

I would much prefer a new version of the user-agent string. Normalize basic information (like OS and browser versions) without revealing too much (build numbers).

That would let servers still get necessary info without having to run even more javascript. It can just be in querystring format to simply parsing on both client and server.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#98

Post by the_pwner224 »

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).

Thnak you, this had been bugging me for a while. Looks like I'll need to permanently install a UA-switcher extension.

Yesterday I saw a HN comment saying you can add the (?|&)disable_polymer=1 parameter to the end of YouTube URLs to make the site much faster - iirc Polymer is extremely slow on Firefox only. This extension was also linked: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-polym...

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any workaround for ReCaptcha on FF. I generally end up opening the website in the GNOME or KDE (Falkon) browser which use something like WebKit/Blink - there it works on the first try every time.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#99

Post by mmis1000 »

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 ?

https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069?hl=en

They do, I'm not sure that should be called as a 'fix' though.

Because it even works perfectly on firefox as long as you spoof your useragent to chrome.

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