UA Gotta Be Kidding
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UA Gotta Be Kidding
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Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#2For some reason, I always enjoy reading about UA history. There’s rarely anything new (for me, partially because I lived through some of those earlier changes), but I’m still entertained.
This had a new tidbit in the final section, though: They are working on a new XR browser [0] and history is repeating itself.
Only tangentially related, but when I checked the mobile browser stats for Germany, I found out about Instabridge which seems to be some ad-tech wifi password sharing app and seems close (7.75 % - 10.58 % to overtaking Samsung Internet as 3rd biggest browser. It appears as if almost all their users came from Safari.
[0]: https://wolvic.com/
[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/germa...
Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#3Hm, I thought this was going to be about Ukraine (UA is its ISO code), not a browser's User-Agent string. I started by reading the comments and found them pretty confusing.
Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#4Reminds me of this classic: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#5Is there something like a "capabilities declaration" in the works to actually solve the problem? You know, something like a "X-I-Support: images, frames, ecma6, vr, xss" header?
I could even imagine an "assigned capability strings" database and x- prefixes and all, but it's probably an old fool's dream in these fast-m— thing-breaking times.
Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#6Is there something like a "capabilities declaration" in the works to actually solve the problem? You know, something like a "X-I-Support: images, frames, ecma6, vr, xss" header? I could even imagine an "assigned capability strings" database and x- prefixes and all, but it's probably an old fool's dream in these fast-m— thing-breaking times.
Javascript can expose capabilities, but it doesn’t help if you want to do server side processing, before sending any response to the client.
At this point I think UA spoofing is effectively a compact capabilty declaration, where you say “I can do everything X does + Y and Z specifically”
Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#7Hm, I thought this was going to be about Ukraine (UA is its ISO code), not a browser's User-Agent string. I started by reading the comments and found them pretty confusing.
Same for me, but I started with article.
Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#8Hm, I thought this was going to be about Ukraine (UA is its ISO code), not a browser's User-Agent string. I started by reading the comments and found them pretty confusing.
Upon opening the article the first line would have informed you otherwise.
Instead you felt compelled to instead reply to tell everyone you know that UA is the Ukrainian ISO code.
Did you really find the comments "confusing", or is that artistic license?
It comes across like, "I couldn't just read the headline and immediately post my reaction to it". You're not the first to have this reaction to HN articles, and you won't be the last, but it's very dismissive of the eclectic nature of HN articles to charge into the comments to discuss something else entirely.
Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#9Hm, I thought this was going to be about Ukraine (UA is its ISO code), not a browser's User-Agent string. I started by reading the comments and found them pretty confusing.
Upon opening the article the first line would have informed you otherwise. Instead you felt compelled to instead reply to tell everyone you know that UA is the Ukrainian ISO code. Did you really find the comments "confusing", or is that artistic license? It comes across like, "I couldn't just read the headline and immediately post my reaction to it". You're not the first to have this reaction to HN articles, and you…
I did find it confusing and I often read the comments first, because I usually find them more interesting. The first line of the article did inform me otherwise: your insight is accurate. I didn't mean to degrade your forum experience.
Edit: by the way, if you want don't want to be dismissive of whatever good there is in HN's community, you'd do well not to presume that others are dishonest ("artisticly licensed"). I spent the morning reading about what's actually happening in Ukraine and saw a post on UA's history (this post) and came in expecting to read more about Ukraine. I experienced amusing confusion and shared that.
Re: UA Gotta Be Kidding
#10I think it's interesting to note that the majority of web developers for at least the last 10 years have realised that the User Agent is a very flaky way to determine capability. It is almost universally ignored now (with a few enterprise-level exceptions)
So the usual solution is feature detection, where the javascript and/or CSS learns the true capabilities of the browser, and switches features on and off accordingly. Of course, if you depend on generating a lot of capability specific content on the server side, this may be an issue - but in that _extremely_ rare case that's easily worked around by asking the js to redirect to a URL with specific capabilities baked in (or loading a specific javascript file)