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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#101

Post by _0w8t »

jorams wrote: post #36

The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user age…

The things that replaces the user agent will still be enough to differentiate Chrome from Firefox and Safari.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#102

Post by leeoniya »

does this mean there will no longer be a way of determining if the device is primarily touch (basically all of "android", "iphone" and "ipad") or guesstimating screen size ("mobile" is typical for phones in the UA) on the server?

https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/user-agent

i wonder what Amazon will do. they serve completely different sites from the same domain after UA-sniffing for mobile.

is the web just going to turn into blank landing pages that require JS to detect the screen size and/or touch support and then redirect accordingly?

or is every initial/landing page going to be bloated with both the mobile and desktop variants?

that sounds god-awful.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#103

Post by developer2 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #69
thaumasiotes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. This seems like a pretty good reason in itself why they might be interested in phasing out User-Agents.

It's the exact opposite. Without User-Agents, sites need to depend on feature detection, and closing the feature discrepancy between Chrome and other browsers is more complicated than just spoofing your UA to get Google to serve you functioning versions of their products.

I interpreted your parent's comment differently; namely, if Google's developers can't do User-Agent detection, then internally even they will have to improve how they develop (eg. via feature detection), making their products more compatible with other browsers.

Many people assume Google, as an upper-level business decision, purposely makes products work better on Chrome in order to vendor-lock users to the browser. Maybe that's true; or maybe it's developers being lazy and using User-Agent detection. Removing their ability to do so might actually improve cross-browser compatibility of Google products.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#105

Post by vxNsr »

untog wrote: post #58
vxNsr wrote: post #44

> https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints I don't really understand how this will result in any real difference in privacy or homogeneity of the web. Realistically every browser that implements this is gonna offer up all the info the server asks for because asking the user each time is terrible UX. Additionally this will allow google to further segment out any browser that doesn't implement this because they'll ask f…

> I don't really understand how this will result in any real difference in privacy or homogeneity of the web. It does a little: sites don't passively receive this information all the time, instead they have to actively ask for it. And browsers can say no, much like they can with blocking third party cookies. In any case I'm not sure privacy is the ultimate goal here: it's intended to replace the awful user agent snif…

> It does a little: sites don't passively receive this information all the time, instead they have to actively ask for it. And browsers can say no, much like they can with blocking third party cookies.

Lets run through that scenario:

sites that don't need this info still aren't gonna ask for it or use it. sites that want it will get it this way and even if you respond with "no" that's useful to them as well for fingerprinting and as a way to fragment features to chrome only. So, what's changed?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#106

Post by saagarjha »

dtech wrote: post #61
tmpz22 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve started seeing alphabet employees use this as an excuse: “oh that happened on team x there’s nothing I could’ve done”. On small technical issues the excuse is fine - on large moral issues it does not work.

In large corporations politics are abound. If the Chrome division cannot get other divisions to behave through other means, this is fine. You can see that they should have fought harder and escalated, but issues like this are probably not the ones most upper-middle management want to potentially damage their career for.

It's not fine, but it's certainly to be expected.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#107

Post by bdcravens »

leeoniya wrote: post #102

does this mean there will no longer be a way of determining if the device is primarily touch (basically all of "android", "iphone" and "ipad") or guesstimating screen size ("mobile" is typical for phones in the UA) on the server? https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/user-agent i wonder what Amazon will do. they serve completely different sites from the same domain after UA-sniffing for mobile. is the web just goi…

Presumably you'll grab the dimensions (could cache after first load) and then render dynamically based on that. If you're doing some sort of if statement on the server to deliver content based on screen size you're probably doing it wrong. Obviously I can't speak for every mobile user, but for myself, it's infuriating to have a completely different set of functionality on mobile.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#108

Post by llbeansandrice »

mmis1000 wrote: post #85
numpad0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had been having an issue with Google Sheets and Firefox that the app decides to change row height randomly. On Firefox only. Obvious solution to which being...

It actually insert a line break on enter, make it invisible and can't be deleted only on firefox. Pretend firefox as chrome makes it works perfectly. They lock the community thread and fixed that after several days I found the finding and post it there. Shame on you, google.

Oh my god. I knew it was inserting a line break when I hit enter but I didn't realize it was a FF only issue. gdi Google.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#109

Post by blntechie »

jorams wrote: post #36

The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user age…

Every single Google product is slower on Firefox and it’s hard to not call this malice and artificial. Many people check out Gmail and GMaps on Firefox and go back to Chrome because of their clunkiness on Firefox.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#110

Post by uk_programmer »

adrianN wrote: post #88
uk_programmer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that without User Agent sniffing in some circumstances there is no other way of working round a browser bug e.g. There are cases where browsers will report that it supports such feature using one of the feature checks but the implementation is garbage. The only way is to have a work around based on user-agent sniffing. Sure a lot of developers abuse the feature but I fear this might create another set…

The other way is not using that feature until all browsers you care about implement it correctly.

It is rarely an options. Additionally defects are introduced into features that have been supported for quite a while.
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