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The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

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Re: The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

#31

Post by mattl »

cma wrote: post #20
jrochkind1 wrote: post #9

In retrospect, wasn't putting "Mozilla" in your user-agent string when you aren't the Mozilla Foundation or project a trademark violation, that they could have enforced?

You can't use trademark in that way if they would need it for compatibility. Nintendo made games have a "nintendo" title scroll on Gameboy and checked for it as "genuine cartridge" protection in a special chip, and sued third parties for trademark violations if they included the title scroll to get around the protection chip. Courts ruled Nintendo couldn't use trademark in that way, that it was laundering in more rig…

This isn’t quite right. The BIOS checks for a copy of the Nintendo logo/name in certain ways on boot because licensed games include a copy.

Nintendo also manufactured the games which made this easier.

Re: The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

#33

Post by MBCook »

I know it would be a temporary disaster but I think at this point I wish Safari, FF, Chrome and Edge would just decide on a flag day to get rid of user agents.

From March 17th, 2023 (or whatever) all user agent strings are now “WebBrowser/1.0” until the end of time.

Just force the switch to better methods.

Re: The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

#35

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

jchw wrote: post #14
pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Nope. A web browser browsers the world wide web. A WebDAV file browser just speaks HTTP. No hypertext, no web. edit: Wow, it's not really that complicated. Please take a moment to stop taking a crowbar to each and every crack and crevice of this argument. It's not about hypertext specifically, or hypermedia, or HTTP, or HTML, that's missing the point. The point is, a web browser is software that browses websites. A W…

[flagged]

Re: The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

#36

Post by logicallee »

MBCook wrote: post #33

I know it would be a temporary disaster but I think at this point I wish Safari, FF, Chrome and Edge would just decide on a flag day to get rid of user agents. From March 17th, 2023 (or whatever) all user agent strings are now “WebBrowser/1.0” until the end of time. Just force the switch to better methods.

what are better methods?

Re: The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

#37

Post by auscompgeek »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #12
zitterbewegung wrote: post #6

Are they talking about only MacBook Pros with Intel chips since they reference Butterfly keyboards or is that sarcasm that sort of feels out of place ?

I strongly suspect they’re referring to the aspects of the UA string specific to their own device . I.e. they used an MBP (whose vintage can be intuited from its notorious keyboard problems and) which has evidently stopped receiving OS updates past 10.15. Edit to add: I also suspect they thought this was a clever way to avoid some nerd inevitably chiding them to upgrade their OS, but it’s probably too clever to achie…

Mozilla froze the macOS version in User-Agent strings past Catalina too, also due to web compatibility issues (particularly with older versions of the Unity game engine).

Other engines do the same as well: https://www.otsukare.info/2021/02/15/capping-macos-user-agen...

Re: The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

#39

Post by masswerk »

MBCook wrote: post #33

I know it would be a temporary disaster but I think at this point I wish Safari, FF, Chrome and Edge would just decide on a flag day to get rid of user agents. From March 17th, 2023 (or whatever) all user agent strings are now “WebBrowser/1.0” until the end of time. Just force the switch to better methods.

I think, there's still use for it. E.g., I recall when Chrome 32 would fail to play a newly created Web Audio BufferSource, unless the playback call came from inside a decodeAudioData() callback. At the same time, you couldn't use this approach to playback sound from e.g. Safari iOS, since the callback lacked the user interaction blessing, resulting in muted audio. Try-catch wasn't an option either, since, as soon as the playback failed over any attempt to play that node in the traditional way over a null-buffer exception, the source node was already expired and won't play at all. The only way to handle this situation was user agent sniffing in order to detect Chrome and to handle it as an edge case. (Mind that the API was still the same and there was no way to feature detect this behavior.) There's no guarantee that something like this won't happen again.

Re: The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

#40

Post by Bick2 »

masswerk wrote: post #39
MBCook wrote: post #33

I know it would be a temporary disaster but I think at this point I wish Safari, FF, Chrome and Edge would just decide on a flag day to get rid of user agents. From March 17th, 2023 (or whatever) all user agent strings are now “WebBrowser/1.0” until the end of time. Just force the switch to better methods.

I think, there's still use for it. E.g., I recall when Chrome 32 would fail to play a newly created Web Audio BufferSource, unless the playback call came from inside a decodeAudioData() callback. At the same time, you couldn't use this approach to playback sound from e.g. Safari iOS, since the callback lacked the user interaction blessing, resulting in muted audio. Try-catch wasn't an option either, since, as soon as…

Also this:

https://catchjs.com/Blog/SameSiteCookies

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