STOP SNIFFING USER AGENTS
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“Sorry” for shouty title, I suppose, but IT’S NOT FUCKING DIFFICULT.
So in the endless quest to move fast and break everything, all the major browsers (except Safari) are verging on their hundredth “major” versions, and naturally all the shitty websites which never learn are liable to balk at a three-digit version number:
https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/labels/version100
So following the tried and tested tradition of user agent strings, Chrome and Firefox naturally intend to lie about being an older version on top of all their other pretences.
Version 100 in Chrome and Firefox – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog
Chrome and Firefox will reach version 100 in a couple of months. Let's work together on fixing User Agent detection issues.
I can’t wait for the era of Chrome pretending to be an older version of Chrome pretending to be Webkit pretending to be Safari pretending to be KHTML pretending to be “like Gecko” pretending to be Netscape. It’s Webscale!
And of course the shitty websites of the world will learn nothing from this double-decade debacle.
Just get rid of user agents forever. Everyone can pretend to be Chrome to the sites that suck and leave everything else behind. Fuck’s sake.
(obligatory: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/)
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@kazitor Chrome has actively tried to convince people to use their new generation of browser indication parameters for a while but I don't think anyone except core Chrome cares.
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Yeah, but we all knew this would happen… remember when FF started supporting -webkit-CSS because the webd00vs weren't ever going to move away from the SO snippet they found five years ago?
Fortunately, the only thing actual-browser UAs¹ are used for are the biorhythm charts for marketroids. Look, Potatosurf 7.61 has seen a 150% increase! Welcome! Your page got 40 clicks in 28 days!¹ as opposed to "what do I have to put in robots.txt to tell semi-legitimate hopefully-wellbehaved search engine to GTFO" user agents.
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You'd think glue would help against slippery slopes, but you'd be wrong, it was always just the gateway drug on layer 1. Sniffing Ethernet and IP was next, now they're at L7 with their user agents and Musk only knows what they'll be sniffing once we get those neurochips. Adreno-Chrome probably.
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@LaoC high density shitpost.
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We should sniff unicorn butts instead!
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@Tsaukpaetra they’d be as accurate and useful.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in STOP SNIFFING USER AGENTS:
We should sniff unicorn butts instead!
If anyone is the great Unicornholio, it's certainly you.
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@LaoC said in STOP SNIFFING USER AGENTS:
@Tsaukpaetra said in STOP SNIFFING USER AGENTS:
We should sniff unicorn butts instead!
If anyone is the great Unicornholio, it's certainly you.
It's one of the ways to tell impending rainbow output.
Be careful though, unicorn rainbows are quite spicy!
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@Arantor said in STOP SNIFFING USER AGENTS:
new generation of browser indication parameters
[nobody] cares
It's not capability testing or graceful degradation, so it's about as useful as a UA string.
