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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#171

Post by adwww »

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…

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

What, that's totally backwards. Anyone using a bot to do things that might get blocked by publishers fakes the string, legit purposes should really show who / what they are.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#172

Post by jedberg »

adwww wrote: post #171
jedberg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Any legit person building a legit bot would know to fake the agent string. What, that's totally backwards. Anyone using a bot to do things that might get blocked by publishers fakes the string, legit purposes should really show who / what they are.

We only blocked agent strings with "lib" in them. You could change the agent to "WebScraperSupreme.com" and it would have been fine (and in fact some people did do that).

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#173

Post by Talanes »

adrianmonk wrote: post #150
dijit wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The "hard not to call" portion takes it from the realm of objective fact and into subjective measure.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#174

Post by michaelmrose »

iso1631 wrote: post #167
michaelmrose wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding google properties what do you prefer and why?

Google maps does tend to be better than OSM when it comes to route finding, I use !gm when I want routing. On my phone I use apple maps though. Gmail is painful compared with OWA (work) and zoho (home), I stopped using my gmail account for new stuff about a year ago.

I prefer mu4e (mu for email) although ultimately I'm still using my gmail account just with another interface. I like the idea of ultimately just setting up a mail server but realistically its really really hard to switch everything at once when you have a lot of existing accounts so I'll probably be maintaining a gmail account forever.

I'm trying maps.me because unlike google it does offline walking directions but I haven't used it enough.

I really want to like duck duck go but it feels like google still provides better results.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#175

Post by klodolph »

jefftk wrote: post #165
klodolph wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sen…

> My employer’s website uses every technique under the sun, including push and CDNs. Are you actually seeing good results from push? I have seen many projects try to use it, but am not aware of any that have ended up keeping it. (Disclosure: I work at Google)

> Are you actually seeing good results from push?

Push isn’t worth it, from what I understand. I think that’s the conclusion at work.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#176

Post by ldng »

klodolph wrote: post #158
ldng wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sen…

>> 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?

I've seen a few CDN having a page loading a grid of image in HTTP/1 at page load, and then load the same stuff with HTTP/2 on a button click. It indeed shows you a nice speed up.

Except, when you block the first HTTP/1 load and start with loading with HTTP/2 first and flush cache between loads, the speedup vanishes. The test is disingenuous, it is not testing HTTP/2 but DNS cache velocity.

So, those type of website makes me rather cautious. And the test, for the small scale workloads I work with, have not been very conclusive.

Do you have serious articles on the matter to recommend ? Preferably not CDN provider trying to sell me there stuff.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#177

Post by ldng »

jefftk wrote: post #165
klodolph wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sen…

> My employer’s website uses every technique under the sun, including push and CDNs. Are you actually seeing good results from push? I have seen many projects try to use it, but am not aware of any that have ended up keeping it. (Disclosure: I work at Google)

Well, that is a shame, it was to me the main selling point that could eventually win me over.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#178

Post by vbezhenar »

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.

There are different kinds of DRM. Streaming websites allow different quality for different kinds of DRM. E.g. they allow best quality only for best protected DRM (which should use encryption all the way from Netflix webserver to your display). There's software DRM (decrypting stream inside proprietary blob) which is considered weaker, so you'll receive acceptable quality in Chrome. I don't know why Chrome did not implement the most secure DRM. Hopefully Microsoft will contribute their patches back.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#179

Post by bluGill »

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.

I just use the contact site to send them a note to cut it out. There are better ways to prevent spam. Like my password that I just entered in the latest case. I'll go elsewhere in the next, they have competitors that won't be that different in price and easier to use.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#180

Post by babypuncher »

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.

Other browsers support Widevine which is by far the more popular DRM scheme.
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