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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

#31

Post by tracker1 »

I really wish that all phone/tablet/mobile OSes would simply include an X-Screen-Size (Xpx, Xpx, Xcm) and X-Touch-Enabled header.

I've used the detectmobilebrowsers.com as a baseline in the past, and only tweaked slightly so that fallbacks with "phone" will be xs (extra small), otherwise common mobile OSes would get "sm" (small), while desktops get "md" (medium) ... if you use adaptive CSS, and JS you can/should of course adapt if the pre-rendered environment doesn't match.

There are other modules written to predetermine a lot more, but it's all kind of a bit sad.

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#32

Post by endgame »

err4nt wrote: post #5
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.…

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…

Testing for features over platforms was known to be a good idea since the early days of autoconf (1991-1992, according to the history in its info file). Why did the web folk take so long to figure this out?

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#33

Post by Zarel »

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.

My most recent problem unsolvable by feature detection has to do with the HTML5 `dragend` event:

https://github.com/Zarel/Pokemon-Showdown-Client/commit/30f2...

In Chrome, event.pageX/pageY refer to the position of the top left corner of the drag-preview-image, relative to the top left corner of the page.

In Safari, event.pageX/pageY refer to the position of the mouse curser relative to (0, window.innerHeight * 2 - window.outerHeight), a point slightly above the bottom left corner of the screen.

(Neither of these is spec, which as far as I know says that event.pageX/pageY should be the position of the mouse cursor, relative to the top left corner of the page.)

I eventually got around it by storing values from the `drop` event, but anyone who needed these values from the `dragend` event would be screwed.

My next most recent problem unsolvable by feature detection has to do with HTML5 Notification, whose API was massively changed recently. Attempting to use the new API on old versions of Chrome would cause the render process to crash (not just throw an error you could catch in a try-block, but actually crash like http://i.stack.imgur.com/DjdCX.png ). Of course, using the old API on new versions of Chrome would fail silently, so there was zero way to reliably deliver a notification to the latest version of Chrome without crashing older versions or using user agent detection:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=139594

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#34

Post by zachlatta »

frou_dh wrote: post #16
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.…

Almost daily I have to spoof my User Agent to claim to be an iPad due to sites confidently proclaiming that Flash is """required""" to get at some audio/video content. What do you know, spoof User Agent, and their Flash """requirement""" instantly evaporates. Pet peeve.

Any sites in particular?

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#35

Post by Khaine »

zachlatta wrote: post #34
frou_dh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost daily I have to spoof my User Agent to claim to be an iPad due to sites confidently proclaiming that Flash is """required""" to get at some audio/video content. What do you know, spoof User Agent, and their Flash """requirement""" instantly evaporates. Pet peeve.

Any sites in particular?

Nearly every website that has flash outside of youtube and vimeo

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#37

Post by ucho »

endgame wrote: post #32
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…

Testing for features over platforms was known to be a good idea since the early days of autoconf (1991-1992, according to the history in its info file). Why did the web folk take so long to figure this out?

Autotools don't only check for features, it also checks for bugs. For example I know that Firefox SVG support is buggy and I need to use Canvas version of OpenLayers for that browser - how am I supposed to do it without UA sniffing?

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#38

Post by err4nt »

endgame wrote: post #32
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…

Testing for features over platforms was known to be a good idea since the early days of autoconf (1991-1992, according to the history in its info file). Why did the web folk take so long to figure this out?

For the most part it didn't matter until recently.

Netscape versus IE (late 90's) - features didn't matter, they just rendered HTML and CSS differently

Firefox versus IE (early 00's) - Firefox added a bunch of great CSS support and things like rounded corners and PNG transparency, so once we could use those we could just supply a polyfill for the specific IE version that needed it. Opera could handle it already, Netscape was Firefox rebranded. Only IE (which announced itself as IE) needed extra help

Mobile vs Desktop (late 00's) iPhone! Android! Tablets! Now is where things start to get a little crazy, IE will be IE but a bigger concern is the separation between tiny little touchscreen devices browsing a website, and a massive desktop computer

Mobile versus Mobile (early 10's) - IE never says it's IE, we have smart watches, phones, phablets, tablets, netbooks, notebooks, and still desktops. There is Firefox, and Chrome that run on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOs, and Android, there's Safari which runs on OS X, Windows (old version), and iOS, there's IE, of which there are 8,9,10,11 and the new ones in circulation, and a handful of other browsers like Android browser that kind of gave up a long time ago but are still used.

I'm sure backend software was rife with feature-detection for the OS's it ran on (Redhat versus CentOS, special support for IIS, etc) but until things exploded after the iPhone was released in 2007 the web had very predictable deficiencies that could be addressed more directly than feature detection.

I can remember as a Linux user, there were plenty of websites that would only let 'approved' User-Agents in, because they would rather you NOT see their site than see a site in a browser they didn't support. When using Linux I often didn't have access to IE or Netscape, so I would use Firefox or Konqueuror to spoof a different User-Agent. Nintendo.com used to be like this, plus others.

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#39

Post by frou_dh »

zachlatta wrote: post #34
frou_dh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost daily I have to spoof my User Agent to claim to be an iPad due to sites confidently proclaiming that Flash is """required""" to get at some audio/video content. What do you know, spoof User Agent, and their Flash """requirement""" instantly evaporates. Pet peeve.

Any sites in particular?

BBC (News, iPlayer, ...) is a major offender: https://vid.me/VgNv

Re: User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites

#40

Post by oldmanjay »

endgame wrote: post #32
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…

Testing for features over platforms was known to be a good idea since the early days of autoconf (1991-1992, according to the history in its info file). Why did the web folk take so long to figure this out?

1) it didn't take "web folks" long. It was near immediately after the availability of the browser as an application platform that the advice took hold to those willing to heed it.

2) The existence of autoconf et al is not in any way preventing people from performing platform tests all over the place, so it's not like a panacea.

Sorry if you find this a bit abrasively worded, I aimed to avoid that, but you made me bristly with your implication that "web folk" are somehow lesser.

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