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Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

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Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#221

Post by Dylan16807 »

ksec wrote: post #215
asveikau wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair number of websites will still block perfectly working features based on what OS you use. Some examples I've seen using the latest Firefox on *BSD: Facebook won't let you publish or edit a Note (not a normal post, the builtin Notes app). I think earlier they wouldn't play videos but they might have fixed that. Chase Bank won't let you log in. Gives you a mobile-looking UI which tells you to upgrade to the lates…

I am guessing Banks only test their site against popular OS and Browser for security reasons.

I think you mean their broken idea of what a security reason is. Banks are generally really bad at actual web and mobile security.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#222

Post by voltagex_ »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #192
Lammy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is WideVine.

It is?! The only public way to decrypt that which I'm aware of stopped working 15 years ago.

If you still see pirated copies of shows marked with WEB-DL (rather than Webrip), there's a way of decrypting the content directly. I really doubt the methods that are used are public, though.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#223

Post by myko »

gregoriol wrote: post #4

As usual, this will fuck up the users, and not the techy nerds making such decisions, but the average joe because things on the internet will be broken for them.

This is unquestionably good though.

Instead of relying on a user agent which doesn't tell the entire story web site developers will need to check whether or not a feature exists in a browser before using it.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#224

Post by asveikau »

ksec wrote: post #215
asveikau wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair number of websites will still block perfectly working features based on what OS you use. Some examples I've seen using the latest Firefox on *BSD: Facebook won't let you publish or edit a Note (not a normal post, the builtin Notes app). I think earlier they wouldn't play videos but they might have fixed that. Chase Bank won't let you log in. Gives you a mobile-looking UI which tells you to upgrade to the lates…

I am guessing Banks only test their site against popular OS and Browser for security reasons.

Ok then, don't tell all the other financial institutions I use FreeBSD then, they are all letting me through without issue.

It sounds a lot like you are making excuses for them and bad/lazy/poorly thought out code.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#225

Post by magicalhippo »

hartator wrote: post #112

New proposed syntax adds even more noise: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.1.2222.33 Safari/537.36 Sec-CH-UA: "Chrome"; v="74" Sec-CH-UA-Full-Version: "74.0.3424.124" Sec-CH-UA-Platform: "macOS" Sec-CH-UA-Arch: "ARM64" Why not getting rid of the `User-Agent` completely? It's already bad infrastructure design to have the server do different renderin…

Why the hell does a regular website need to know what OS and CPU architecture I got?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#226

Post by Humphrey »

Interesting. We don't use UA to track customers, but it has been invaluable information for trying specific bugs. Eg, twice in the past 2 months, I've had to fix weird bugs that didn't make sense. The only way I was able to solve them was to look for patterns in which browsers and versions those who reported the bugs were using. Both turned out to be to do different iOS Safari cookie related bugs that only occurred in specific versions. Without logging the UA there would have been no way I would have been able to discover those bugs and create workarounds for those iphone users.

I'm all for preventing tracking, but I can't imagine a time where all browsers behavior so similarly that we won't have to write workarounds for browser bugs and differences. As a developer I can't imagine caring about Edgium vs Chrome, but it's important to know what the underlying engines are.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#227

Post by jaggirs »

untog wrote: post #134
vxNsr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 finge…

> 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 To an extent, sure. But to follow the model of third party cookies, let's say client hints are used extensively instead of user agent and all cross-domain iframes are blocked from client hint sniffing. All the third party iframe is going to be able to detect is whether user has a client hint ca…

You could also not give the useragent to the iframes.

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#228

Post by dirtydroog »

jefftk wrote: post #201
vxNsr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the "privacy budget" an actual feature of chrome or just an idea? I've never heard of it until now.

It's a proposal for how to prevent fingerprinting: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/08/potential-uses-for-privacy...

It prevents others fingerprinting, not Google though. Isn't there that x-Client-Data header than chrome only sends to Google domains?

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#229

Post by dirtydroog »

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…

Anything to do with HTTP is a mess!

Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

#230

Post by jensvdh »

chii wrote: post #199
recursive wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I used piratebay, I saw a lot of porn and malware/scam ads. I had to find and install a torrent client. Then I had to make sure I was downloading a movie that had enough seeders. And then I couldn't watch the movie until (and if) the download finished. When I use netflix, I have a much better experience.

You obviously haven't tried popcorntime.

Which is illegal.
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