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

miketaylr.com

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

#71

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

howinteresting wrote: post #63
MBCook wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that should happen. Does the user’s browser support WebDoodle2? Why try to parse a weird history of nonsense and combine that with a table of what versions of what browser supports what? Just check if document.doodle2 is defined. Done. Reliable. Easy. FF pretends to be Chrome pretends to be Safari pretends to be IE pretends to be Netscape pretends to be Mosaic pretends to be god only knows. Actually asking via JS…

Problem is some versions of some browsers have bugs in some parts of doodle2, and the largest websites tend to care about things like that.

Browser subversions were a problem in IE6 days, almost all modern browser usage is now on very recent browser versions.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

Hizonner wrote: post #48

Stop sending User-Agent. Replace it with nothing. Not client hints. Nothing. If sites start rejecting Firefox clients because of that, then instead change it to send exactly the same User-Agent (and other software identification) that Chrome sends, and commit to exactly faking Chrome's signals in the future. The UA header never had any business existing to begin with. Servers guessing client capabilities from the sof…

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by paranoidrobot »

Hizonner wrote: post #48

Stop sending User-Agent. Replace it with nothing. Not client hints. Nothing. If sites start rejecting Firefox clients because of that, then instead change it to send exactly the same User-Agent (and other software identification) that Chrome sends, and commit to exactly faking Chrome's signals in the future. The UA header never had any business existing to begin with. Servers guessing client capabilities from the sof…

I'm with you for the most part. Today, with modern browsers on almost all devices and relatively high memory, compute and bandwidth capabilities - for certain.

However I can't agree with this:

> The UA header never had any business existing to begin with.

The early mobile web, and devices that were just too low-powered and/or low-bandwidth to support even early CSS/JS-based capabilities detection absolutely depended on server-side rendering to serve them mobile-HTML friendly sites.

Yeah, it was terrible, it was painful and insane to manage - but was necessary.

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

#76

Post by olliej »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #44
bobse wrote: post #41

>Teams are broken under Firefox >change useragent to egde/chrome >it works now Thank you Microsoft.

This is just anti-competitive practice, yes? Presumably unlawful.

No, it's just standard web developer laziness. They haven't made it IE only, they just broke the less popular browser, and likely anything else that is not chrome/blink, because chrome/blink is the new IE: its bugs define "correct behavior" it shipping something means "it's standard", no different from the "IE is the internet" era (and just like chrome there was a long period where IE was the best browser, before devs started targeting it alone).

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

#77

Post by Macha »

andirk wrote: post #62
MBCook wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just check if the thing you want is defined in JS. Maybe add some supplementary methods to help with that kind of check. Parsing out the UA header mess is a disaster.

This is the correct answer. Allow 3rd party analytics or whatever to do as they choose, but your javascript should pretty much never believe a UA string. `if (someFeature && someFeature.someSpecificMethod)...` Or you can try/catch if you are less sympathetic to inferior tech.

This would be sufficient if features were a yes/no binary of supported or not, but sometimes browsers implement features but get them wrong, or incompletely.

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

#78

Post by bee_rider »

heavyset_go wrote: post #66
codetrotter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Won't this likely result in browser detection to be pushed to JavaScript and create an arms escalation race? NoScript. https://noscript.net/

There are plenty of services that won't serve you data, neither web app nor data from API calls, if you aren't running a JS engine.

If they are important enough, add an exception.

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

#79

Post by bobse »

olliej wrote: post #76
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just anti-competitive practice, yes? Presumably unlawful.

No, it's just standard web developer laziness. They haven't made it IE only, they just broke the less popular browser, and likely anything else that is not chrome/blink, because chrome/blink is the new IE: its bugs define "correct behavior" it shipping something means "it's standard", no different from the "IE is the internet" era (and just like chrome there was a long period where IE was the best browser, before dev…

It does work correctly once you change useragent string though.

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

#80

Post by heavyset_go »

bee_rider wrote: post #78
heavyset_go wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of services that won't serve you data, neither web app nor data from API calls, if you aren't running a JS engine.

If they are important enough, add an exception.

My point with my comment was addressing the GP's claim about fingerprinting being pushed to JavaScript in an arms race, which is what's happening and is something that NoScript can't really stop unless millions/billions of people start using it.

NoScript is great, I use it, but isn't a solution to fingerprinting via JS if you actually want to talk to the servers that fingerprint that way.

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