YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 for 2 weeks

Re:YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 f... by pdkl95 on Sunday January 10, 2016 @08:53PM (#10878310)

> It communicates exactly what the browser is

This is true, which is not particularly useful when deciding if a feature is available. Using the user agent to make this decision incorrectly assumes that all user agents of a particular browser+version all support exactly the same set of features. This is obviously not true.

The user agent may be meaningful[1], but the meaning that it communicates isn't feature data.

[1] If you take the header at it's word; as the bug being discussed demonstrates, user ages may be lying.

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Re:YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 f... by cornstalks on Sunday January 10, 2016 @09:18PM (#10878386)

> [...] the meaning that it communicates isn't feature data.

But it kind of is (to some degree, at least). VP9 was recently added to Firefox 28. If the User Agent says the browser is Firefox 27, then you probably shouldn't try serving VP9 to that browser.

Obviously the User Agent doesn't communicate the complete feature set. But some useful inferences regarding features can be derived from it.

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