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Server-side tracking of user agent strings should still be possible.

Yeah, I think the root comment of this thread is talking out of his ass. Third-party trackers are not needed, and wouldn't make sense to use, to discern browser market share; browsers self-report their identity and operating system unless specifically configured not to. For example, my User-Agent string in my GET request to retrieve Hacker News is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0".

Except we should be pushing for the elimination of user agent strings, too. They just end up being used as a lazy way for lazy developers to not test for capabilities.

The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string, but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your browser lie.

That's the sort of this that should be illegal for anticompetitive reasons.

I strongly agree. I don't think a website is going to do anything with my user agent string that benefits me. I'd much prefer a web where websites can't do things outside of the standard. We ne er needed webmidi, but a company that makes a browser/is hybrid definitely wanted it.

Speaking of Google, won't this interfere with their "look we're not a monopoly" payments to Mozilla Corp?

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