Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

infoq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 329 posts

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#231

Post by userbinator »

hartator wrote: post #112

New proposed syntax adds even more noise: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.1.2222.33 Safari/537.36 Sec-CH-UA: "Chrome"; v="74" Sec-CH-UA-Full-Version: "74.0.3424.124" Sec-CH-UA-Platform: "macOS" Sec-CH-UA-Arch: "ARM64" Why not getting rid of the `User-Agent` completely? It's already bad infrastructure design to have the server do different renderin…

Why not getting rid of the `User-Agent` completely?

Try browsing the web without any UA header for a week or two, and you'll understand. You get blank pages, strange server errors, and other weird behaviour --- almost always on very old sites, but then again, those also tend to be the sites with the content you want. Using a UA header, even if it's a dummy one, will at least not have that problem.

(I did the above experiment a long time ago - around 2008-2009. I'm not sure whether sites which expect a UA have increased or decreased since then.)

I agree with getting rid of all that new noise, however.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#232

Post by dirtydroog »

magicalhippo wrote: post #225
hartator wrote: post #112

New proposed syntax adds even more noise: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.1.2222.33 Safari/537.36 Sec-CH-UA: "Chrome"; v="74" Sec-CH-UA-Full-Version: "74.0.3424.124" Sec-CH-UA-Platform: "macOS" Sec-CH-UA-Arch: "ARM64" Why not getting rid of the `User-Agent` completely? It's already bad infrastructure design to have the server do different renderin…

Why the hell does a regular website need to know what OS and CPU architecture I got?

Visitor metrics -> audience segmentation / fingerprinting -> advertisers

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#233

Post by gerdesj »

recursive wrote: post #198
tryptophan wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its absurd that paying customers get a worse experience than just using the piratebay.

Last time I used piratebay, I saw a lot of porn and malware/scam ads. I had to find and install a torrent client. Then I had to make sure I was downloading a movie that had enough seeders. And then I couldn't watch the movie until (and if) the download finished. When I use netflix, I have a much better experience.

"Last time I used piratebay, I saw a lot of porn"

Why did you use piratebay unless that was your goal?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#235

Post by jefftk »

dirtydroog wrote: post #228
jefftk wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a proposal for how to prevent fingerprinting: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/08/potential-uses-for-privacy...

It prevents others fingerprinting, not Google though. Isn't there that x-Client-Data header than chrome only sends to Google domains?

The X-Client-Data header is documented in https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#variat... and Chrome uses it to run experiments to make the browser better. It's not used for fingerprinting.

(Still speaking only for myself)

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#236

Post by recursive »

manigandham wrote: post #97

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.

Any user agent string will eventually be forced down the same path. Web sites use them to deny content. And the browsers will continue to try to match more patterns so their users see the content.

As long as they exist, I can see no escaping this arms race.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#237

Post by numpad0 »

marakv2 wrote: post #209
freeopinion wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or... quit using buggy app?

Except, that has been pointed out in the parent comments, it's not the application, it's a deliberate bug targeted towards a different browser(hence changing the user agent fixes it).

Except, there’s always the (Libre)Office!

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#238

Post by recursive »

superkuh wrote: post #93

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 choic…

> User-agent is super useful to human people.

For what? Honest question. You have to be like a 5th-level user agent wizard to make any sense of user agent strings, since every browser now names every other browser. How do you do anything useful with this in a way that's forward-compatible?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#240

Post by isbjorn16 »

marakv2 wrote: post #209
freeopinion wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or... quit using buggy app?

Except, that has been pointed out in the parent comments, it's not the application, it's a deliberate bug targeted towards a different browser(hence changing the user agent fixes it).

There's a strong argument to be made here that the "buggy app" is Google Sheets.
Post reply on HN