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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#251

Post by neodymiumphish »

tryptophan wrote: post #193
jgunsch wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other browsers support DRM too, but with different tradeoffs. Chrome uses Widevine, but one of Chrome's philosophies is that you should be able to wipe a Chrome install, reinstall Chrome, and have no trace that before/after are the same person. That means no leveraging machine-specific hardware details that would persist across installs. "Software-only DRM", essentially. Edge on Windows (and Safari on OSX) are able t…

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

Wait til you see how amazing the experience can be with Usenets...

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#252

Post by userbinator »

kabacha wrote: post #243
userbinator wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

I mean at first this change will cause all of these errors too until the servers migrate from user agent string to device hints. Getting rid of UAs would actually force meaningful update rather than migration.

Getting rid of UAs would actually force meaningful update rather than migration

...and effectively block access to a bunch of existing content on the Internet, still very valuable, whose owners may not have the effort to spare to make any changes.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#253

Post by kbumsik »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #250
colde wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the only browser to support DRM. But the only browser to support PlayReady on Windows, which brings added security compared to what Widevine offers on Windows. Another popular choice for high quality is Safari on macOS because it implements Apple's FairPlay.

*Added security for the remote server but massively reduced security for the end users computer.

Any source?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#254

Post by untog »

jaggirs wrote: post #227
untog wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sites that want it will get it this way and even if you respond with "no" that's useful to them as well for fingerprinting To an extent, sure. But to follow the model of third party cookies, let's say client hints are used extensively instead of user agent and all cross-domain iframes are blocked from client hint sniffing. All the third party iframe is going to be able to detect is whether user has a client hint ca…

You could also not give the useragent to the iframes.

Who knows how many sites that would mess up, though. Backwards compatibility is both the web’s greatest strength and biggest pain point.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#255

Post by besieged »

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.

I don't live in Europe but I canceled my Netflix the minute I learned that Reed Hastings is taking advantage of the coronavirus situation to increase Netflix's bottom line by limiting streaming quality to everyone in Europe after one phone call with a French politician.

There are plenty of torrent streaming and download clients that work just as well and are just as convenient as Netflix, without needing to rely on a central authority.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#256

Post by nofunsir »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #206
stirner wrote: post #146

Meanwhile, you can still use youtube.com/tv to control playback on your PC from your phone—but only if you spoof your User-Agent to that of the Nintendo Switch [1]. Sounds like they are more interested in phasing out user control than ignoring the header entirely. [1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/16442768?hl=en&msg...

Oh wow. I used that in the past and it worked great. I didn’t realize Google broke it only to force us to use their app. What a bunch of turds. Thank you for the Nintendo Switch pro-tip.

Yes. I firmly believe this is an attack on user control.

For example, I believe they REALLY want us to use the youtube app:

- Viewing youtube.com on a new iPad pro, Goolag lies and says "your browser doesn't support 1080p."

- Ok, change to desktop version in app. Goolag once again lies and says "your browser doesn't support full screen." They also lie and say they've redirected you to the "desktop version", and nag you with a persistent banner that you should return to the safety of the mobile website.

- Ok, change to "request desktop version" via user agent. Full functionality. Full screen is DEFINITELY possible with a javascript bookmark. 1080p+ is DEFINITELY possible. Ads blocked in browser.

If I were to use the app, they would have FULL CONTROL.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#257

Post by nofunsir »

I view this as an attack on the web as it stands.

Google wants to create a walled-garden net. Goog-net. All ads, shopping, videos, documents, email, locations, articles flowing through THEIR protocols and THEIR servers and THEIR fiber. No possibility of blocking ads they don't want blocked. No URLs. No Agent strings. No user control. Only user consumption.

If they have to allow some small chump players to have a piece of this cake (a la: "Oh trust us, AMP is an 'open' protocol and anyone can host it. it's not just for our own benefit in the end. Trust us.") in order for the entire population to accept their changes bit by bit, so be it in their eyes. They know we would reject an outright takeover.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#258

Post by kalleboo »

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…

I can understand including the browser and version (to work around bugs that are not detectable with feature detection), the OS, OK I guess there are also a few OS-specific bugs?

What the heck is the CPU architecture good for?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#259

Post by Polylactic_acid »

kbumsik wrote: post #253
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*Added security for the remote server but massively reduced security for the end users computer.

Any source?

It allows websites to run arbitrary code blobs which interact with a hardware backdoor in your CPU with a higher permission level than the OS. With the multiple exploits that have been found in intel cpus and the Management Engine itself there is no way you should be letting any website do that.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#260

Post by cdata »

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…

Chrome team members are face-palming with the best of us whenever a Google product does backwards things like filtering based on user agent string.

Google isn't a singularity ️

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