Hacker News Reader

Comment by surround | Hacker News Reader

Good. User-agent strings are a mess. Here is an example of a user-agent string. Can you tell what browser this is?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

How did they get so confusing? See: History of the browser user-agent string https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Also, last year, Vivaldi switched to using a user-agent string identical to Chrome’s because websites refused to work for Vivaldi, but worked fine with a spoofed user-agent string. https://vivaldi.com/blog/user-agent-changes/

View on HN

If companies like Google wouldn't abuse the user agent string to block functionality, serve ads, force their users to specific browser then companies like Google wouldn't have to use fake UA strings and then maybe companies like Google wouldn't have to drop their support.

Anything to do with HTTP is a mess!

Chrome 0.2 on Windows XP?

As a web developer, I have very little trouble reading the User-Agent header.

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"

Sec-CH-Mobile: ?0

Isn't moving this information to a separate Sec-CH-UA headers going to make things _more_ messy? Especially if it's in _addition_ to the frozen User-Agent header?

Aren't we still going to have the issue with needing to fake even the new Sec-CH-UA header?

If we're going to freeze the User-Agent header, that's fine, but don't just move the unfrozen info to a separate header. Now you have 2 problems.

Aren't we just making the problem worse?

Very little trouble? That user agent says it’s Mozilla, then says it’s Windows 10, then says it’s Apple, then says it’s Gecko, then says it’s Chrome, then even though it said it was Windows it goes on to say it’s Safari.

The individual headers, on the other hand, tell you EXACTLY what the system and browser is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com