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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#291

Post by collinmanderson »

jsjddbbwj wrote: post #278
surround wrote: post #138

Good. User-agent strings are a mess. Here is an example of a user-agent string. Can you tell what browser this is? Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13 How did they get so confusing? See: History of the browser user-agent string https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ Also, last year, Vivaldi switched to using a user-agent st…

Chrome 0.2 on Windows XP?

As a web developer, I have very little trouble reading the User-Agent header.

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"

Sec-CH-Mobile: ?0

Isn't moving this information to a separate Sec-CH-UA headers going to make things _more_ messy? Especially if it's in _addition_ to the frozen User-Agent header?

Aren't we still going to have the issue with needing to fake even the new Sec-CH-UA header?

If we're going to freeze the User-Agent header, that's fine, but don't just move the unfrozen info to a separate header. Now you have 2 problems.

Aren't we just making the problem worse?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#292

Post by collinmanderson »

kalleboo wrote: post #258
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?

It's so sites can auto serve 64bit vs 32bit (etc) binaries when downloading software.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#293

Post by collinmanderson »

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…

Yeah, aren't we just making things a lot more messy? Especially if we're not planning on removing the User-Agent header?

This pattern keeps repeating itself, freeze "Mozilla/5.0", start changing "Chrome/71.1.2222.33", freeze that, start changing "Sec-CH-UA", etc. Browsers will start needing to fake "Sec-CH-UA" to get websites to work properly, etc.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#294

Post by josefx »

kalleboo wrote: post #258
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?

Some download sites offer the correct binaries for your current system as default option.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#295

Post by collinmanderson »

jefftk wrote: post #162
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…

Switching it from passive to active means you can count it towards https://github.com/bslassey/privacy-budget . Yes, sites can ask for all sorts of things, but if they ask for enough that they could plausibly be fingerprinting you then they start seeing their requests denied. (Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

So why not still send limitied information by default in the User-Agent header, and if they ask for it, send more information in User-Agent header? (keep everything in one spot?)

Why are we creating redundant headers?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#296

Post by sitkack »

myko wrote: post #219
sitkack wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's the opposite of what is happening though

We are talking about the same object in two entirely different contexts.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#297

Post by franga2000 »

currysausage wrote: post #71
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…

If you have the new Chromium-based Edge ("Edgium") installed: the compatibility list at edge://compat/useragent is really interesting. Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn't. [Edit] Here is the full l…

I'm guessing Edge specifically also has to do that not only because of chrome==good queries, but also because of many, many edge==bad queries.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#298

Post by collinmanderson »

jefftk wrote: post #165
klodolph wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, is it really such an improvement? Yes, unequivocally. It’s amazing, even without push. The websites that use it are faster, and the development process for making apps or sites that load quickly is much more sane. You don’t have to resort to the kind of weird trickery that pervades HTTP/1 apps. > Or is it just an improvement for Cloud provider that keep pushing the Kool-Aid ? I don’t see how that makes any sen…

> My employer’s website uses every technique under the sun, including push and CDNs. Are you actually seeing good results from push? I have seen many projects try to use it, but am not aware of any that have ended up keeping it. (Disclosure: I work at Google)

For comcenter.com I push CSS, except if the referrer is same origin.

I _think_ it's working pretty well as far as I can tell.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#299

Post by jefftk »

collinmanderson wrote: post #298
jefftk wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My employer’s website uses every technique under the sun, including push and CDNs. Are you actually seeing good results from push? I have seen many projects try to use it, but am not aware of any that have ended up keeping it. (Disclosure: I work at Google)

For comcenter.com I push CSS, except if the referrer is same origin. I _think_ it's working pretty well as far as I can tell.

If you were up for running an A/B test (diverted per-user, since cache state is sticky) and writing up the results publicly I'd love to see it!

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#300

Post by willvarfar »

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…

To get Microsoft Teams to run in Chromium there used to be a user-agent hack to make it pretend to be Chrome. This was superseded by someone packaging up using Electron. And finally this has been superseded by Micrsoft themselves supporting Linux using something that looks and feels like Electron again.

So, basically, Microsoft using user-agent to detect Chrome....

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