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A comment on Xbox Cloud throttles performance if user agent is Linux. Parent comment

Re:Xbox Cloud throttles performance if user agent is Linux by jolux on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @06:36AM (#31986532)
Yeah but you’re assuming the programmers who worked on this don’t make dumb mistakes like the rest of us. Especially not since they’re working for one of the only major tech companies where all the devs use Windows and might make bad assumptions based on their environment.
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Re:Xbox Cloud throttles performance if user agent is Linux by wolrah on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @09:22AM (#31987911)
> Yeah but you’re assuming the programmers who worked on this don’t make dumb mistakes like the rest of us.

Yeah but this isn't just a "dumb mistake".

It's been widely discussed in the web design world how terrible of an idea it is to use the user agent for basically anything at all for literally decades now. There are web designers working now who were not born when this problem was first discussed. It's not a "oops I didn't know about this recent change" thing, it's a "doing this has been known to be a bad idea for so long there are obsolete books that talk about it".

The reason browser user agents are the disaster area they are today is entirely because bad web programmers have been abusing the user agent in ways they shouldn't be for so long.

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Re:Xbox Cloud throttles performance if user agent is Linux by jolux on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @10:05AM (#31988321)
Microsoft is far from the only company that sniffs, they all sniff. If you give people information they’re bound to use it. This is all commonplace in web dev.
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Re:Xbox Cloud throttles performance if user agent is Linux by eddieroger on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @09:56AM (#31988236)
If it was truly a dumb mistake, of which I am doubtful, then let's see it fixed now that it's in the wild. User Agent detection has never been a great method of client identification, and is just a means to an end in the absence of a better option.
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Re:Xbox Cloud throttles performance if user agent is Linux by jolux on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @10:11AM (#31988393)
I don’t know that it was a mistake but it doesn’t seem implausible to me.
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Re:Xbox Cloud throttles performance if user agent is Linux by kaladin-jasnah on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @07:47AM (#31987044)
I wonder if many people will even be aware that Android _is_ Linux.
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