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Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

The latest comment on the issue states that Mozilla has a patch that can be emergency-deployed as a patch release. The proposed patch literally overrides the UA string for Google.

Is it just me, or is this absolutely insane? When Google ships a bug, it's suddenly the responsibility of browser vendors to "fix" it at the browser level?

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It's not the responsibility of the browser vendors. But they have an interest in un-breaking the experience for their users. In a sense, Google is too big to fail, so users want it to work any way possible.

It happens all the time, you probably just don't realize it. There is special code in Windows for supporting/un-breaking popular applications, same with Android and iOS.

Yup, it is unfortunately very common. Open `about:compat` in Firefox to see all of the cases where they work around site issues. Right now I count 32 user-agent overrides, 38 "Interventions" and 49 "SmartBlock Fixes".

IIUC "Interventions" are typically injected scripts or styles and "SmartBlock Fixes" are exceptions to tracker blocking.

It's literally older than Google

Here's Raymond Chen sharing some of the worst examples from the 90s

https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplec...

That’s quite the read! I didn’t appreciate how much effort went into making the Win95 compatibility layer.

We're back to the internet explorer days!

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