Congratulations Google, you did it! You killed the User-Agent header.<p>The HTML spec already requires all browsers to report themselves as Netscape in the Netscape-era `navigator` object:<p><pre><code> appCodeName - Must return the string "Mozilla".
appName - Must return the string "Netscape".
product - Must return the string "Gecko".
</code></pre>
So a few more "oopses" from Google products and the next spec will end up saying:<p><pre><code> User-Agent - Must be equal to the string "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.79"</code></pre>
Can we take a moment to appreciate how obtuse UA strings are? I mean really, the user agent<p>Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.99 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/2.9.1705.41<p>is almost laughable for a strange collection of historical reasons. The history of UA strings has come up before here:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525559" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525559</a><p>When is a browser going to just ditch the cruft and present something sensible?
No mention of the UA string would be complete without this 2008 gem, one of my all-time favorite bits of geek lore / culture:<p><a href="https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/" rel="nofollow">https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/</a>
I have seen a few cases where users complain that our mobile app (which runs in a webview inside a native app) doesn't work for them. When we look in the server logs, we find a user agent string that indicates a user is running iOS 11.4.1. My theory is that the older version indicates that the client's mobile device has run out of storage space. The device can't download the update to iOS 13.x since there is insufficient storage available on the device.<p>Even if the user frees-up some space on their device, not enough to upgrade to iOS 13.x, but enough to run our app theoretically, our app still fails to run for them. Uninstalling and reinstalling the native app that contains the webview that runs our web app doesn't solve the problem either. My theory is that there are truncated versions of some of our javascript files left over from when the device ran out of storage that don't get re-downloaded even when storage is later made available....<p>I've been telling people to free-up space on their device and upgrade it to iOS 13 to fix the problem. I sure hope that works...<p>If all user agents become a fixed string, how on god's green earth will we troubleshoot problems reported by users? I sure hope we get another header that will tell us the real client platform information so we can eventually repeat this exercise after another few years...<p>This scenario is complicated, but my point is really that of course we need a User Agent to accurately tell what platform the client is running for entirely legitimate reasons and mega corporations should not do patently evil things to make the lives of developers and support people even more frustrating than they already are. There should be laws against things like this. It really is fraud to change something like the User Agent string to a constant value that is incorrect, and it WILL lead to damaging events in real people's lives if it happens. People could be fired for being led down the wrong investigative path when troubleshooting problems. From the article, it sounds like significant damage has already been done.
I'm surprised Slack isn't on the list, it refuses to work with Waterfox at least (which only appends its name to the Firefox user agent it's based on), and presents a stupid and condescending lecture about why it's for your own good, to boot.
Heh, I remember my university wouldn’t let you login to wifi without having their site-licensed anti-malware software.<p>So I changed my UA to a Mac and got online without it.
Does anyone think that User Agent should be killed off?<p>If we had no way of detecting between browsers that would lead to a much more consistent cross-browser experience in the long run and not allow one browser's dominance to affect the internet experience for the rest.
I think they went exactly in the wrong direction. Given that they have a very small market share it is understandable.<p>However, what if the latest Firefox or Chrome would just have a user string
"Chrome/80.0 (Windows 10; Win64; x64)"?<p>And if you run into a problem you get a button that reverts to the old horrible piece of junk.<p>Now that robots.txt is established and security.txt is almost there, the next thing we need is a contact.txt that browsers can use to offer a button that will allow sending bug reports to webmasters without having to search the site for the contact address.
> <i>Every other site will get a User Agent that appears to be identical to Chrome. There is a downside for us in doing this since Vivaldi will effectively disappear from third party rankings of browser popularity (we will be indistinguishable from Chrome) but that is a price we will happily pay to provide the best website compatibility for our users.</i><p>Why not choose a FF UA string then? At least they would be doing the world a favor!!
Comments here on User-Agent fail to mention how browsers can be distinguished by the headers they send and the ordering of those headers. For example, the User-Agent header might be the 9th header in a Chrome browser while in a Firefox browser it might be the 2nd header. By default, neither Chrome nor Firefox may send exactly the same number of headers.
User-Agent should be able to be set by the page following the spec. there is a chromium bug since 2015 that covers it but Google doesn't care:<p><a href="https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=571722" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=571722</a><p>which is blocked by<p><a href="https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=595993" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=595993</a><p>which is blocked by<p><a href="https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=963260" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=963260</a>
That is so bad idea. Why choose Chrome? Let it be Firefox? Web analytics will show even higher numbers for Chrome, hence developers would not bother to test anywhere but in Chrome.