Re:Show HN: A self-updating list of the most current useragents
by Joker_vD on Sunday December 18, 2022 @02:44AM
(#34035753)
On the one hand, I absolutely agree, UA-dependent behaviour is generally a huge PITA. Some sites even refuse to return content if you don't set UA header in request, WTF is with that? Last time I checked, only Host header was absolutely required.
But on the other hand, there are certainly some cases where you want to know actual browser version to work around the critical bugs: e.g., Safari 13 (I think?) had broken their implementation of WebSocket compression for about a year: the byte stream becomes garbled after about 64 KiB of data transmitted, and the WebSocket connection breaks down. How do you work around that without UA string?
And on the third hand, we may have proper APIs for feature detection nowadays but — how many webdevs actually have heard of them? And willing to update their legacy codebases? I personally haven't although I'm not a webdev by any stretch. And when one tries to google how to e.g. support some feature in different browsers, there are lots of older pages/resources/answers telling how to do it with contents of the UA header.
But on the other hand, there are certainly some cases where you want to know actual browser version to work around the critical bugs: e.g., Safari 13 (I think?) had broken their implementation of WebSocket compression for about a year: the byte stream becomes garbled after about 64 KiB of data transmitted, and the WebSocket connection breaks down. How do you work around that without UA string?
And on the third hand, we may have proper APIs for feature detection nowadays but — how many webdevs actually have heard of them? And willing to update their legacy codebases? I personally haven't although I'm not a webdev by any stretch. And when one tries to google how to e.g. support some feature in different browsers, there are lots of older pages/resources/answers telling how to do it with contents of the UA header.