The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by ris58h » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 4:37 AM UTC

rieTohgh6 wrote: post #135

ris58h wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Chrome had other bug that you can't work around? Users just would have to update it. It is that simple.

Last time I had resort to UA sniffing Firefox had issues with clikable horizontal/vertical lines on SVG. There was no version that supported it properly. So I should just display "Switch to Chrome" banner for Firefox users? Is it that simple?

> There was no version that supported it properly.

So what's the point of sniffing UA? What was your fix?

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

#142

Post by IIsi50MHz » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 8:20 AM UTC

codetrotter wrote: post #54

metadat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I was like "Yeah buddy, preach on". Then came the next thought: Then what. Site providers will still will want to know and this likely results in a browser detection excalation arms race pushed to JavaScript. I still think servers shouldn't get to know so much about browser clients, certainly not PII-level details (PII-level being the norm as it exists today).

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

Can we presume a premise that having Javascript disabled is the dominant condition, and therefore does not make a browser stand out from the herd? What if having it disabled is true of only a small percentage of browsers?.

If we assume that the user-agent string is set to whatever is "most common", and Javascript is disabled, are there no other identifiable bits of information? What about CSS fingerprinting?

Perhaps the expected adversaries are not sufficiently motivated to try to sort somebody into a cohort based on lack of Javascript, and the remaining observable data?

(But not saying NoScript has no uses.)

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

#143

Post by IIsi50MHz » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 8:29 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #18

pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A homing pigeon, on the other hand, is not. But certain standards could allow it to deliver User-Agent headers nonetheless.

IP-over-avian-carrier? With QoS?

RFC 1149: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149

RFC 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549