User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
bugzilla.mozilla.org
User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#2It's an unfortunate state of affairs when a modern browser has to spoof another browser just to get the right content. The user agent in Microsoft's new browser does this by default [1][2]. As a user, I'd love to see a day when browsers don't reveal their user agents and web developers rely on feature detection instead. I admit, though, that I haven't fully considered the collateral damage that might come with that.
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/31279980
[2]: http://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mor...
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#3It's an unfortunate state of affairs when a modern browser has to spoof another browser just to get the right content. The user agent in Microsoft's new browser does this by default [1][2]. As a user, I'd love to see a day when browsers don't reveal their user agents and web developers rely on feature detection instead. I admit, though, that I haven't fully considered the collateral damage that might come with that.…
Agreed re feature detection. This could lead to an uncomfortable world for devs where the UA becomes completely unreliable - may force a migration to feature detection.
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#4It's an unfortunate state of affairs when a modern browser has to spoof another browser just to get the right content. The user agent in Microsoft's new browser does this by default [1][2]. As a user, I'd love to see a day when browsers don't reveal their user agents and web developers rely on feature detection instead. I admit, though, that I haven't fully considered the collateral damage that might come with that.…
Also UA detection can happen before feature detection which is very handy in some cases such as redirection based on device. Feature detection also implies that there is some sort of client that runs the response which is not always the case.
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#5It's an unfortunate state of affairs when a modern browser has to spoof another browser just to get the right content. The user agent in Microsoft's new browser does this by default [1][2]. As a user, I'd love to see a day when browsers don't reveal their user agents and web developers rely on feature detection instead. I admit, though, that I haven't fully considered the collateral damage that might come with that.…
Sniffing User-Agent has been poor practice since 2011 , in favour of feature detection using a library like Modernizr.
I used to advocate using something like Modernizr and then writing your code against the results, but now I think an even more straightforward approach is to just do the feature detection you wish to use directly in your code. No sense in loading in a library and testing for things you don't need, still only to have those tests totally decoupled from the parts of your codebase that depend on the feature detection.
It makes more sense to do only the feature detection you need right in your codebase adjacent to the code which relies on the results.
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#6UA overrides are enabling the poor web design that necessitates them. If web sites aren't punished for doing the wrong thing they'll keep doing, requiring more overrides, which hides the bugs, etc.
Stop this feedback loop. The client is not responsible for the server's bugs.
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#7UA overrides are enabling the poor web design that necessitates them. If web sites aren't punished for doing the wrong thing they'll keep doing, requiring more overrides, which hides the bugs, etc. Stop this feedback loop. The client is not responsible for the server's bugs.
[deleted]
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#8It's an unfortunate state of affairs when a modern browser has to spoof another browser just to get the right content. The user agent in Microsoft's new browser does this by default [1][2]. As a user, I'd love to see a day when browsers don't reveal their user agents and web developers rely on feature detection instead. I admit, though, that I haven't fully considered the collateral damage that might come with that.…
Yeah, so its going to report as 'Edge 1.0', not match anyone's regex and a "You need IE6 or higher to visit this page" error?
User agent sniffing is just a bad practice. Everything about it is a hack. There's no right way to do something wrong.
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#9I guess this then contributes to a feedback loop. People will check their stats, see that Firefox isn't used, and pay less attention. Sucky position to be in.
Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
#10This is certainly unmaintainable. There are two aspects I find especially interesting.
The first is how many different ways sites are determining the browser corresponding to the user agent. You know that they're all based on "guess and test": come up with an idea for an if condition, open up the code in the 5 browsers you care about, see if the result works. It almost reminds me of the output from a fuzzer: it's a valid answer, but you can tell a random number generator and a lot of tries is what got you there.
The second is how many web developers seem fine writing the same website many times; once for mobile, once for IE, once for Chrome, once for Firefox. I've always taken the approach of doing exactly one site, and using whatever features are available in the worst browser the client wants supported. If extensive workarounds are needed to make the feature work in every browser, I say skip it. (I was always happy with what IE6 could do.) Of course, when I did web development, it was mostly boring corporate applications, not public websites that face pressure from competitors that are willing to write a codebase from scratch for every browser back to NSCA Mosaic. I consider myself very lucky.