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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#281

Post by true_religion »

nofunsir wrote: post #256
ahmedalsudani wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Are you deliberately misspelling Google as Goolag to make it sound like gulag?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#282

Post by crucialfelix »

chii wrote: post #199
recursive wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You obviously haven't tried popcorntime.

Used it once, cost me €840.

With torrents you can get a film in minutes. With popcorn you are exposed the entire time you watch the film.

In Germany they monitor peer connections and send a payment demanding an out of court settlement. After two years they escalate to a court appearance in a remote town. If you don't show, you lose and they turn it over to debt collection.

But I have to say Birdman was a great film.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#284

Post by rubin55 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #214
recursive wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I'm not on Linux. 2) I'd rather have the convenience of streaming at all than the best possible resolution. I don't know what the resolution of my TV is, but I highly doubt it's over 1080p, if that.

Streaming above 720p also doesn't work via Firefox on any operating system.

Source?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#285

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

heavyset_go wrote: post #214
recursive wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I'm not on Linux. 2) I'd rather have the convenience of streaming at all than the best possible resolution. I don't know what the resolution of my TV is, but I highly doubt it's over 1080p, if that.

Streaming above 720p also doesn't work via Firefox on any operating system.

According to the test pattern videos I'm getting 1080p in Firefox on Windows

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#286

Post by matt-attack »

jgunsch wrote: post #184
ShamelessC wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is off topic but do you know why Edge is the only browser to support DRM for streaming? Or is that incorrect? I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.

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…

> 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.

Why would that be their philosophy? It sounds like some kind of privacy-motivated idea which seems contrary to Google’s typical philosophy. Or is it more about portability?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#287

Post by tjpnz »

crucialfelix wrote: post #282
chii wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You obviously haven't tried popcorntime.

Used it once, cost me €840. With torrents you can get a film in minutes. With popcorn you are exposed the entire time you watch the film. In Germany they monitor peer connections and send a payment demanding an out of court settlement. After two years they escalate to a court appearance in a remote town. If you don't show, you lose and they turn it over to debt collection. But I have to say Birdman was a great film.

This is exactly why I use a VPN. Last thing anyone needs is to be inconvenienced by BS laws bought buy special interests.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#288

Post by josefx »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #91
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.

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

Chrome includes a unique installation id in requests to Google owned domains. They don't need any cookies or user agents to guess who you are and best of all they don't have to share that information with their competition.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#289

Post by pocket_cheese »

jaywalk wrote: post #43
derefr wrote: post #40

These days, it feels like the sole use of User-Agent is as a weak defence against web scraping. I've written a couple of scrapers (legitimate ones, for site owners that requested machine-readable versions of their own data!) where the site would reject me if I did a plain `curl`, but as soon as I hit it with -H "User-Agent: [my chrome browser's UA string]", it'd work fine. Kind of silly, when it's such a small deterr…

Preventing scraping is an entirely futile effort. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to tell a project manager that if a user can see it in their browser, there is a way to scrape it. Best I've ever been able to do is implement server-side throttling to force the scrapers to slow down. But I manage some public web applications with data that is very valuable to certain other players in the industry, so t…

As a person who scrapes sites (ethically), I think it's impossible or pretty damn near impossible to prevent a motivated actor from scraping your website. However, I've avoided scraping websites because their anti scraping measures made it not worth the effort of figuring out their site. I think it's still worth for do minimal things like minify/obfuscate your client side JS and use some type of one time use request token to restrict replay-ability. The difference between knowing that I can figure it in 30 minutes vs 4 hours vs a few days is going to filter out a lot of people.

Of course, sometimes obfuscating how your website works can make it needlessly more complicated, so it's a trade off.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#290

Post by iso1631 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #174
iso1631 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google maps does tend to be better than OSM when it comes to route finding, I use !gm when I want routing. On my phone I use apple maps though. Gmail is painful compared with OWA (work) and zoho (home), I stopped using my gmail account for new stuff about a year ago.

I prefer mu4e (mu for email) although ultimately I'm still using my gmail account just with another interface. I like the idea of ultimately just setting up a mail server but realistically its really really hard to switch everything at once when you have a lot of existing accounts so I'll probably be maintaining a gmail account forever. I'm trying maps.me because unlike google it does offline walking directions but I…

> I really want to like duck duck go but it feels like google still provides better results.

I find I get better results with ddg than google. YMMV I guess.

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