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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#141

Post by jrandm »

ShamelessC wrote: post #129
currysausage wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the new Chromium-based Edge ("Edgium") installed: the compatibility list at edge://compat/useragent is really interesting. Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn't. [Edit] Here is the full l…

This is off topic but do you know why Edge is the only browser to support DRM for streaming? Or is that incorrect? I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.

I am not sure about Edge specifically, but as someone who tries to use mostly open source software: Digital Rights Management (DRM) requirements often directly conflict with licensing related to open source software.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#142

Post by mindcrime »

blntechie wrote: post #109
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.

"Google ain't done, till Firefox won't run"?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#143

Post by jedberg »

basscomm wrote: post #131
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 weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. I frequently consume web articles with a combination of newsboat + Lynx, and it's astounding how many websites throw up HTTP 403 messages when I try to open a link. They're obviously sniffing my user agent because if I blank out the string (more accurately, just the 'libwww-FM' p…

> I'm pretty sure that the webmasters responsible for this are using user agent string blocking as a naive attempt to block bots from scraping their site, but that assumes that the bots that they want to block actually send an accurate user agent string the first place.

That is exactly what they are doing, and it works really well.

We blocked user agents with lib in them at reddit for a long time.

Any legit person building a legit bot would know to fake the agent string.

The script kiddies would just go away. It drastically reduced bot traffic when we did that. Obviously some of the malicious bot writers know to fake their agent string too, and we had other mitigations for that.

But sometimes the simplest solutions solve the majority of issues.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#144

Post by StillBored »

Semaphor wrote: post #28
3pt14159 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Safari with no plugins. Even Disney World has a broken website for buying tickets for me. The web is breaking because it's gotten way too complex and the fight against trackers is leading to random failures of things that used to work.

To be fair, you are using a browser that makes it impossible to test in unless you happen to have a current mac.

Thats true, but its quite likely that simply testing on a couple available browsers and avoiding browser specific checks means that safari (and other non mainstream browser) users will be fine.

There aren't really that many actual standards compliance differences between most browsers, the real problem is all the undefined garbage they are forced to run. Back when I ran a html/css/javascript validator in my browser it frankly shocked me the number mainstream sites that weren't even delivering valid html/css/javascript. In my experience developing a pretty dynamic web site (actually it was a management front-end for a rather complex application) most of our browser differences were caused by bugs that went away simply by providing correct code.

(BTW: my wife has similar problems on her mac)

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#145

Post by colde »

ShamelessC wrote: post #129
currysausage wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the new Chromium-based Edge ("Edgium") installed: the compatibility list at edge://compat/useragent is really interesting. Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn't. [Edit] Here is the full l…

This is off topic but do you know why Edge is the only browser to support DRM for streaming? Or is that incorrect? I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.

Not the only browser to support DRM. But the only browser to support PlayReady on Windows, which brings added security compared to what Widevine offers on Windows.

Another popular choice for high quality is Safari on macOS because it implements Apple's FairPlay.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#146

Post by stirner »

Meanwhile, you can still use youtube.com/tv to control playback on your PC from your phone—but only if you spoof your User-Agent to that of the Nintendo Switch [1]. Sounds like they are more interested in phasing out user control than ignoring the header entirely.

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/16442768?hl=en&msg...

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#147

Post by ldng »

klodolph wrote: post #81
ldng wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, like SPDY/HTTP2 ?

As far as I can tell, HTTP/2 is such a major improvement that no strong-arming is necessary. Speaking as a consumer of the web, as an individual who runs their own website, and at a developer working at a company with a major web presence. The web suffers a ton from the “red queen” rule in so many different ways anyway—you have to do a lot of work just to stay in the same place.

But, is it really such an improvement ? Or is it just an improvement for Cloud provider that keep pushing the Kool-Aid ?

I still see a lot of contradicting benchmark and, apart from some Google Apps, personnally, I have not seen a lot of sites actually really leveraging HTTP2 (including push).

But maybe you did put and leverage HTTP2 on your own website ? At your company ? Did you use push ? Do you use it with CDN ?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#148

Post by Larrikin »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #113
the_pwner224 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thnak you, this had been bugging me for a while. Looks like I'll need to permanently install a UA-switcher extension. Yesterday I saw a HN comment saying you can add the (?|&)disable_polymer=1 parameter to the end of YouTube URLs to make the site much faster - iirc Polymer is extremely slow on Firefox only. This extension was also linked: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-polym... Unfortunately t…

Some advice about ReCaptcha, the audio test is way easier and usually only makes you do it once or twice (as opposed to the 5-10 times you usually have to do when you have disabled tracking). Sometimes it will say you aren't eligible or something, just refresh the page and it will let you try again.

The audio test can also be defeated by ML extensions that do it for you automatically

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#149

Post by philwelch »

Larrikin wrote: post #148
chipperyman573 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some advice about ReCaptcha, the audio test is way easier and usually only makes you do it once or twice (as opposed to the 5-10 times you usually have to do when you have disabled tracking). Sometimes it will say you aren't eligible or something, just refresh the page and it will let you try again.

The audio test can also be defeated by ML extensions that do it for you automatically

Hey wait a minute!

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#150

Post by adrianmonk »

dijit wrote: post #135
ricktdotorg wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> malice and artificial are you actually asserting that Google is purposefully adding code/"tweaking" their web apps to run slowly on browsers other than Chrome? do you have any evidence at all for this other than anecdotes about people experiencing Google web app clunkiness on Firefox?

If there was direct evidence it would warrant its own post, so I think your comment has been made in bad faith since people are talking about their own experiences. That said; if it's possible to measure firefox/chrome performance (with altered user-agents) it would make for a good blog post.

How is "hard to not call this malice and artificial" people talking about their own experiences?
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