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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#151

Post by sudosysgen »

izolate wrote: post #139
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?

It could also be a passive, malicious de-prioritization of bugfixes for Firefox that would cause the same effect. It seems like this would be a more likely scenario.

I would believe that if changing the user agent or toggling some flags didn't fix it.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#152

Post by NotSammyHagar »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #108
mmis1000 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was hitting that too! I wondered what I was doing. I kept getting these weird fields. That fucking sucks. I'd like someone to explain google's point of view about why this is happening? I do override user agent on some systems so random websites work.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#153

Post by philwelch »

_jal wrote: post #127
llbeansandrice wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the first time. For some reason Google really doesn't like people talking about the games they play with browser detection. (That's not snark - I really don't get it. They don't appear to mind people talking negatively about a lot of other stuff they get up to. Maybe lingering antitrust fears from the 90's MS suit?)

Companies are afraid of legal liability much more than they’re afraid of bad PR.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#154

Post by arendtio »

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…

Ikea does it too with some of their tools (just sucks).

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#155

Post by _eht »

jeroenhd wrote: post #92
rozab wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Netflix used to block the Firefox on Linux user agent for no reason

Not for a technical reason, but they had a reason: they provided no support or guarantee that Netflix would ever work on Linux + FF (Ubuntu + Chrome was guaranteed) and they didn't want any support calls for something that they wouldn't help people with anyway. A lot of stuff gets blocked for this reason. The company doesn't want you calling them because HD video doesn't work on Firefox even though you pay for HD qua…

> and they didn't want any support calls for something that they wouldn't help people with anyway.

Even knowing what they were doing, I fielded at least two support requests asking what was going on. I can only hope I wasn’t the only one.

Now that everything plays nicely I just happen to have no interest in Netflix for other reasons...

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#156

Post by rplnt »

surround wrote: post #138

Good. User-agent strings are a mess. Here is an example of a user-agent string. Can you tell what browser this is? Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13 How did they get so confusing? See: History of the browser user-agent string https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ Also, last year, Vivaldi switched to using a user-agent st…

If companies like Google wouldn't abuse the user agent string to block functionality, serve ads, force their users to specific browser then companies like Google wouldn't have to use fake UA strings and then maybe companies like Google wouldn't have to drop their support.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#157

Post by DevKoala »

From the git repo:

> Blocking known bots and crawlers Currently, the User-Agent string is often used as a brute-force way to block known bots and crawlers. There's a concern that moving "normal" traffic to expose less entropy by default will also make it easier for bots to hide in the crowd. While there's some truth to that, that's not enough reason for making the crowd be more personally identifiable.

This means that consumers of the Google Ad stream have one less tool to identify bots, and will pay Google for more synthetic traffic, impressions and clicks; this could be a huge revenue boost for Google. A considerable amount of their traffic is synthetic. I doubt this was overlooked.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#158

Post by klodolph »

ldng wrote: post #147
klodolph wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

> But, is it really such an improvement?

Yes, unequivocally. It’s amazing, even without push. The websites that use it are faster, and the development process for making apps or sites that load quickly is much more sane. You don’t have to resort to the kind of weird trickery that pervades HTTP/1 apps.

> Or is it just an improvement for Cloud provider that keep pushing the Kool-Aid ?

I don’t see how that makes any sense at all. Could you explain that?

> 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 ?

From my parent comment,

> 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.

My personal web site uses HTTP/2. It serves a combination of static pages and web apps. No push. HTTP/2 was almost zero effort to set up, and instantly improved performance. With HTTP/2, I’ve changed the way I develop web apps, for the better.

My employer’s website uses every technique under the sun, including push and CDNs.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#159

Post by arendtio »

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.

In fact, just this week I thought about why Google doesn't make its mobile maps website fast again. It is such a pain to use it on older phones and I totally don't get, why it has to be that slow (doesn't matter if chrome or Firefox).

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#160

Post by NotSammyHagar »

jedberg wrote: post #143
basscomm wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bu…

Yes perhaps. But it caused problems for regular users like this fellow. I also have tried various 'download via script' for web pages for offline use. I thought I had a problem on my end, I never realized I could have been getting blocked.
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