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User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#21

Post by err4nt »

jszymborski wrote: post #14
err4nt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, st…

You don't have to include the whole library. Modernizr allows you to customize the package to only detect for features you need. While writing your own feature detection is still probably lightweight (although not by much if you customize modernizr correctly), you're not going to get all the edgecases Modernizr will unless you spend A LOT of time on it. http://modernizr.com/download/

I get the tradeoff, the problem is when you have 90 projects that customize the library for 90 different needs, and then you want to update those libraries. At that point, you've basically made 90 Modernizr forks. Does it make more sense for you to maintain 90 forks of a library whose codebase you aren't developing and try to keep them current, or to bake-in the parts of Modernizr (with its edge-cases included) right into your codebase for each project, and then only have to maintain your own codebase, instead of your codebase + a library fork.

If you're using the majority of Modernizr tests it makes sense to use the full library, but for the most part me and the other devs I've talked to usually drop the whole library in for ease of maintenance, but mainly use it for one feature alone: touchscreen detection.

Lately I've tried putting some of my HTML on a diet by replacing my need for Modernizr for the purpose of touschreen detection with this snippet:

    if(('ontouchstart' in window)||(navigator.msMaxTouchPoints>0)){
      // code for touchscreens here…
    }
This keeps the test and the result together in the code, and eliminates the need for a library, which can also be an additional single-point-of-failure outside of your control, especially if hosted by a CDN.

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#22

Post by err4nt »

toyg wrote: post #19
err4nt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, st…

> Sniffing User-Agent has been poor practice since 2011 I'm old enough to remember it was much earlier than that. In the early '00s there were already calls to do feature detection; jQuery was released in 2006 and it basically did it for you. In 2015, there is no excuse to do UA sniffing -- if anything, because we now have 20 years of case-history showing people will trivially spoof it.

When I went professional with my web development (2009) I can remember the in-the-know people were actively advocating for feature detection, but it was still common practice even in 2010 to add IE-specific support using conditional comments to load stylesheets with fixes for a known IE version.

You probably still have nightmares of these: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512(v=vs.85).a...

On the way to 2012 it became clear once Microsoft said they never intended to let IE announce itself as IE in the future that the game was finally over for UA sniffing. The funniest part was I still remember the MS fanboy blog post that was saying how wonderful it would be that future versions of IE would identify itself as not IE, and how this would make the world a better place. :P

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#24

Post by greggman »

asyncwords wrote: post #2

It'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.…

Unfortunately for various reason it's often impossible to use feature detection.

2 examples:

1) There's currently no way to reliable check if a browser support device orientation. Maybe because of bugs or incomplete implementations

2) It's impossible to tell when iOS 8.x has added the chrome around the page in landscape removing nearly 1/3rd of the entire view-able area on an iPhone5S.

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#25

Post by robotfelix »

err4nt wrote: post #21
jszymborski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to include the whole library. Modernizr allows you to customize the package to only detect for features you need. While writing your own feature detection is still probably lightweight (although not by much if you customize modernizr correctly), you're not going to get all the edgecases Modernizr will unless you spend A LOT of time on it. http://modernizr.com/download/

I get the tradeoff, the problem is when you have 90 projects that customize the library for 90 different needs, and then you want to update those libraries. At that point, you've basically made 90 Modernizr forks. Does it make more sense for you to maintain 90 forks of a library whose codebase you aren't developing and try to keep them current, or to bake-in the parts of Modernizr (with its edge-cases included) right…

It's worth noting that each custom build includes a commented line with a URL to download the latest version with the same custom set of detects. A great timesaver!

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#26

Post by realusername »

greggman wrote: post #24
asyncwords wrote: post #2

It'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.…

Unfortunately for various reason it's often impossible to use feature detection. 2 examples: 1) There's currently no way to reliable check if a browser support device orientation. Maybe because of bugs or incomplete implementations 2) It's impossible to tell when iOS 8.x has added the chrome around the page in landscape removing nearly 1/3rd of the entire view-able area on an iPhone5S.

There is some other edge cases like this also: the tel: URI protocol and the HTML5 offline cache.

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#27

Post by chc »

err4nt wrote: post #21
jszymborski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to include the whole library. Modernizr allows you to customize the package to only detect for features you need. While writing your own feature detection is still probably lightweight (although not by much if you customize modernizr correctly), you're not going to get all the edgecases Modernizr will unless you spend A LOT of time on it. http://modernizr.com/download/

I get the tradeoff, the problem is when you have 90 projects that customize the library for 90 different needs, and then you want to update those libraries. At that point, you've basically made 90 Modernizr forks. Does it make more sense for you to maintain 90 forks of a library whose codebase you aren't developing and try to keep them current, or to bake-in the parts of Modernizr (with its edge-cases included) right…

If you're "baking in" parts of Modernizr into your codebase, it seems to me you're still maintaining 90 forks, but it's more work and the provenance of the forked code is less clear.

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#28

Post by decode »

toyg wrote: post #19
err4nt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, st…

> Sniffing User-Agent has been poor practice since 2011 I'm old enough to remember it was much earlier than that. In the early '00s there were already calls to do feature detection; jQuery was released in 2006 and it basically did it for you. In 2015, there is no excuse to do UA sniffing -- if anything, because we now have 20 years of case-history showing people will trivially spoof it.

> In 2015, there is no excuse to do UA sniffing

Unfortunately, there are cases where it is still necessary. For example, IE 10 reports that it supports the CSS pointer-events property, but it only works on SVG elements, not HTML elements.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer-events

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#29

Post by andreastt »

whoopdedo wrote: post #6

UA 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.

If a user has a sub-par experience browsing a website in one browser, she will switch to another and the loss is on the browser vendor’s behalf and not the website’s.

The vendor has an obligation to create the best web experience for the user and while it’s certainly a sad state of affairs that not more sites are testing for features rather than the UA string, it’s a sad fact that not all web authors care enough about interoperability to remedy their bad ways.

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#30

Post by frandroid »

asyncwords wrote: post #2

It'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.…

Unfortunately, browser bugs don't come with self-identification APIs.
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