61–70 of 70 posts
If companies are going to start messing with user agent strings again, can we please try to restore some sanity? How about "Internet Explorer 11.0" as a user agent? Would that be so hard?
Good idea. I'd prefer it to be slightly more structured e.g. "Microsoft; Internet Explorer; 11.0" Maker, product name and version should be good enough for everyone.
Dear Microsoft, other browser vendors release new versions on a regular basis, regardless of the operating system number. This enables browser-related technologies to evolve at a more rapid pace. So please do us all a favor and stop locking major IE releases to Windows versions and just try to imitate what others do. We won't judge you for copying, promise. Sincerely, Web developers
Dear Google, please stop arbitrarily bumping your version numbers so you don't have to hear complaints about open source contributions being ignored. Do you seriously expect us to believe you got through 25 real, full versions in 4.5 years? Sincerely, "one guy not trying to talk for everyone".
RFC 2616[0] says in section 14.43 that user agents SHOULD send a User-Agent field. Is there any particular reason why it is still sensible to send such a field at all, rather than maybe something more generic like ‘Crawler’, ‘Graphical’ and ‘Terminal’ (to distinguish the three cases that might come to mind immediately)? In other words, what benefit does a User-Agent field have nowadays when people are told to check f…
There are several situations where a web app has no choice but to rely on the user agent string to vary its behavior. For example, when you let a user download a file, you usually send a header such as: Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=FILENAME But what do you do if the filename contains non-ASCII characters? There are RFCs, but every browser has its own rules about encoding, and IE is especially problematic…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dear Google, please stop arbitrarily bumping your version numbers so you don't have to hear complaints about open source contributions being ignored. Do you seriously expect us to believe you got through 25 real, full versions in 4.5 years? Sincerely, "one guy not trying to talk for everyone".
That's kinda the point, not noticing what the browser version even is, because it's completely irrelevant (except with IE). What's important is that it follows standards and supports new features sooner rather than later.
If companies are going to start messing with user agent strings again, can we please try to restore some sanity? How about "Internet Explorer 11.0" as a user agent? Would that be so hard?
Would that be so hard? Are you being facetious? As far as users are concerned, IE would be broken. Users don't care that it's because of, say, websites with broken useragent sniffing. I'm sure it's even more complicated than that, to be honest. But the overarching principle something Josh Bloch articulated. He said something to the effect that any interface that you publish, even if it includes strings (e.g. a pretty…
anybody who's surfed with a changed user agent for a while care to comment?
I want to start by saying, this article needs a giant dose of grain-o-salt. The PS4 was leaked like how many times? And, we all know how that went. However, As someone who is locked into an app that is tied to IE 6-7, I don't relish the idea of being forced to re-write some 50,000+ lines of legacy code. This does however force our customers to seriously consider putting out an effort to redesign in the first place.
> I don't relish the idea of being forced to re-write some 50,000+ lines of legacy code. You don't have to. Simply set the DOCTYPE to force IE7 quirks mode. This move is clearly intended to improve compatibility with Internet applications.
Is that right or did I read the premise of this article completely wrong? I know you are right for IE 9/ IE 10, but if they change IE 11 to force us to redo our CSS then... that sucks (but is kinda good too cuz I hate the legacy crap code we have).
If you're checking versions and not features, you're doing it wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't relish the idea of being forced to re-write some 50,000+ lines of legacy code. You don't have to. Simply set the DOCTYPE to force IE7 quirks mode. This move is clearly intended to improve compatibility with Internet applications.
Isn't that what the article is talking about... I.E. this could break a lot of custom CSS within our application. Anything that is hacky and works with ie 6-8 will need to be redone. Is that right or did I read the premise of this article completely wrong? I know you are right for IE 9/ IE 10, but if they change IE 11 to force us to redo our CSS then... that sucks (but is kinda good too cuz I hate the legacy crap cod…
If you have an IE6-only intranet application, then by definition you are not depending on user-agent sniffing. In that case, you depend on the continued availability of quirks mode -- not on the user-agent string.
If you have an intranet application that uses user-agent sniffing to support both legacy IE and standards-compliant browsers, then you should simply do nothing. The change in the user-agent string will cause Internet Explorer 11 to be treated as a "like Gecko" browser. This is as it should be, as IE 11 is a standards-compliant browser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that what the article is talking about... I.E. this could break a lot of custom CSS within our application. Anything that is hacky and works with ie 6-8 will need to be redone. Is that right or did I read the premise of this article completely wrong? I know you are right for IE 9/ IE 10, but if they change IE 11 to force us to redo our CSS then... that sucks (but is kinda good too cuz I hate the legacy crap cod…
The article said that the user-agent string was changing -- it said nothing about quirks mode going away. If you have an IE6-only intranet application, then by definition you are not depending on user-agent sniffing. In that case, you depend on the continued availability of quirks mode -- not on the user-agent string. If you have an intranet application that uses user-agent sniffing to support both legacy IE and stan…