Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do I get into using Usenet?
You need: 1. Usenet provider (this allows you to download the links) and Usenet indexer (this allows you to search for content you want because files like movies usually have obfuscated filenames). Example of the former is Frugal Usenet, example of the latter is Drunken Slug (free-ish) or DogNZB (paid). One of the many things you need to watch out for with providers is retention, the length of time they keep the file…
Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
301–310 of 329 posts
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#302Earlier 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…
I'm guessing Edge specifically also has to do that not only because of chrome==good queries, but also because of many, many edge==bad queries.
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#303The 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…
Here in Safari, Gmail is not only 10x buggier than it used to be before the redesign, it also uses at least 10x more client-side resources (CPU, network, ...). A handful of open Gmail tabs single-handedly use more CPU over here than hundreds of other web pages open simultaneously, including plenty of heavyweight app-style pages. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Google’s front-end development process is complet…
But I remain astonished there's an apparently very successful startup who's entire effort is a "pro" webmail client for gmail.
It would have never occurred to me to create a better webmail.
As I reach my greybeard years, I'm increasingly aware that I've been doing everything wrong.
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#304The 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.
Slack, Skype, and Zoom video calls don't work in Firefox, even though WebRTC is an open standard. But Google Hangouts works perfectly.
I'm loath to give Google credit for something that ought to be standard practice, but of the major (key word) free video conferencing options, they seem to be the only one that's Firefox-compatible.
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#305The 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…
Which is probably why Google wants to phase out the user agent.
For sure whatever Google invents to replace it will not be so easily circumvented.
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other browsers support DRM too, but with different tradeoffs. Chrome uses Widevine, but one of Chrome's philosophies is that you should be able to wipe a Chrome install, reinstall Chrome, and have no trace that before/after are the same person. That means no leveraging machine-specific hardware details that would persist across installs. "Software-only DRM", essentially. Edge on Windows (and Safari on OSX) are able t…
Its absurd that paying customers get a worse experience than just using the piratebay.
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#307New 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?
And believe it or not, there are crazy JavaScript bugs that are OS-dependent.
I remember when I was writing a library around the audio API, and the ways it behaved on Chrome were different across Macs, Windows and Android. Detecting the OS with the user-agent string was literally the only way to build code that would work.
Now I've never personally come across that for the CPU architecture, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if there were behavioral differences between 32-bit and 64-bit processors somewhere that affects some JavaScript function or HTML5 call somewhere.
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#308Earlier 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…
For me that list is empty. Edge-dev 82. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Streaming above 720p also doesn't work via Firefox on any operating system.
According to the test pattern videos I'm getting 1080p in Firefox on Windows
Re: Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me that list is empty. Edge-dev 82. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?
IIRC, Edge-dev has an empty list. On stable and beta get the list.