UA Gotta Be Kidding

Post by jedimastert » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

kbelder wrote: post #75

mminer237 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About time. Statistics are mostly dead in favor of privacy anyway. At least this should help stop Google's blatantly anti-competitive practice of neutering search results if you're not using Chrome.

You think Google is reducing info Chrome sends in its user agent string in order to limit the ability of Google to favor Chrome? I can't imagine Google would be doing this without some sort of back-channel method of tracking this exact info. They're likely just removing this info from visibility to other websites, giving themselves a competitive advantage. Man, that sounds a little paranoid, but...

Post by grishka » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #80

grishka wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one important use of the UA string is being able to tell whether it's a computer or a mobile device, to use different templates to render your pages. The new "client hints" botched that because while yes, there is "CH-UA-Mobile" that gives you a straight yes/no answer with no guesswork involved, you have to ask for it first — you can't get it on the first request, which very much defeats its purpose. And don't su…

> And don't suggest me to use the same markup for both desktop and mobile with adaptive styles. More often than not this ends up being equally terrible on both kinds of devices. My experience is generally (though not always) the exact opposite. It’s usually the case that when designers and implementers took the care to ship a properly responsive design, they’ve produced a design that adapts well to many factors. Desi…

Post by eyelidlessness » Tue, May 03, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #84

eyelidlessness wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And don't suggest me to use the same markup for both desktop and mobile with adaptive styles. More often than not this ends up being equally terrible on both kinds of devices. My experience is generally (though not always) the exact opposite. It’s usually the case that when designers and implementers took the care to ship a properly responsive design, they’ve produced a design that adapts well to many factors. Desi…

The problem is that you can't really use the same markup for both touchscreens and mice. Touchscreens call for oversized everything so it's easy to hit things with your finger. Mice are much more precise, enabling you to pack everything more tightly, and capable of hovering, enabling you to add new interactions like revealing things on hover. Moreover, phones are mostly vertical and computer screens are mostly horizo…

  @media (any-pointer: coarse) {
    /* this is a touch screen or other device which would benefit from larger tap targets */
  }

  @media (any-pointer: fine) {
    /* this is a device with a mouse, trackpad, or other similar high precision pointer input */
  }

  @media (any-pointer: coarse) and @media (any-pointer: fine) {
    /* this is both */
  }

Post by pabs3 » Wed, May 04, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

undecisive wrote: post #10

I 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 according…

Post by mike_hearn » Wed, May 04, 2022, 10:17 AM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #83

mike_hearn wrote: post #19

The whole privacy-through-UA thing maybe gone too far though. Safari on M1 Mac identifies itself as Intel Safari. A web server knowing whether you use an older or newer Mac is not going hurt anyone, but the lack of it does hurt the UX of distributing Mac apps. For download size reasons you really want to give the user a build for the right CPU architecture, but due to this lie you have to either ship a fat app to Saf…

> For download size reasons How important is that nowadays? Aren't we talking about just executable code? Just how large is your binary? Universal binaries are very convenient.