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A comment on YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 for 2 weeks. Parent comment

Re:YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 f... by lmm on Sunday January 10, 2016 @08:36PM (#10878268)
What's the cost/benefit on that? Older sites would not update. Newer sites are using better forms of detection, except for the tiny number of sites that put engineering effort into supporting an insane long tail of old browsers.

(SHA-1 deprecation only worked because certificates have to be renewed, so any site with working HTTPS is being actively maintained at some level)

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Re:YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 f... by drdaeman on Sunday January 10, 2016 @10:20PM (#10878577)
Benefit's obvious - getting rid of legacy cruft. It has to be done someday, or by 2030 we'll end up with few kilobyte-long UA strings.

Cost: bajillion man-hours of CEOs, companies and committees trying to negotiate that they all do this at once, then about 10 minutes of developer time to actually code this into reality.

Then some sites would be broken, but old stuff eventually rotting and dying is nothing new on the web. Unfortunately, no idea about the numbers, but I suppose it would be low. If someone has the actual statistics on how much sites become practically unusable without a legacy User-Agent header, that'd be great.

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Re:YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 f... by lmm on Monday January 11, 2016 @04:35AM (#10879804)
> Benefit's obvious - getting rid of legacy cruft. It has to be done someday, or by 2030 we'll end up with few kilobyte-long UA strings.

Which will cost how much by the standards of 2030? Particularly given HTTP/2 header compression.

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Re:YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 f... by drdaeman on Monday January 11, 2016 @06:55AM (#10880268)
Getting lower response times isn't a main point here. Getting rid of the cruft is about sanity, not extra milliseconds.

But I'm sure even by 2040 there still will be a lot of places with awful network connectivity, where every kilobyte would still matter.

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