Hacker News Reader

User-agent strings should have been abolished long ago. It may not do much against sniffing, but it would spare us monstrosities like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36 Edge/17.17134"

View on HN

I was surprised to see how many popular websites rely on things like user agent or referer header to deliver functionality. As soon as you start tinkering with them, they stop working, or say you use an older browser, etc.

Back in the day, safari 2.0.4 encountered a large amount of site breakage because sites were using useragent.indexof(“4”)!=-1 as the test for “are you Netscape 4”, and if you were then they’d use netscape’s layer apis (netscape’s alternative to css). Any changes to the user agent are very scary - that’s kind of how they ended being as terrible as they are.

Yet still sites continue to use the user agent to gate access. The same sites also like to complain about how bizarre UA strings are.

Unfortunately websites break if you stop sending it or dramatically change it. Most browsers can't afford the risk of a dramatic change here.

Breaking things is (sometimes) the only way to progress.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com