If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by subarctic on Friday February 16, 2024 @02:45PM (#39402007)

What did you think we learned?

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Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by lucianbr on Friday February 16, 2024 @02:56PM (#39402147)

That every single behavior that attempts to guess the users's intent becomes a relied upon part of the software, and this over time grows to an impossible amount of cruft.

See this, hilariously hosted also by microsoft: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/funny-sto...

> And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.

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Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by eastbound on Friday February 16, 2024 @03:42PM (#39402680)

In 2024, so we still have websites that are served differently depending on the User Agent?

Could we possibly do away with the User-Agent header, or reset it to a simple “Chrome 150.01”?

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Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by xp84 on Friday February 16, 2024 @04:27PM (#39403203)

Meh. For all the silliness, it’s not that hard to parse one for the main purpose it should be used for, which is determining in aggregate what platforms your users use. As such, we still need things like OS in there anyway. So it wouldn’t get quite that short.

Also I’m amused checking mine that the user agents still say “Intel Mac OS X” even on Apple silicon. I guess they were afraid someone’s parser would think we are on PowerPC without that!

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Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by KTibow on Friday February 16, 2024 @06:00PM (#39404182)

I vaguely remember plans to make the user agent simpler but I can't find anything that matches with some quick web searching. The most relevant article I could find was from 2013: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/09/user-agent-detection-histo...

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Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by dwattttt on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:51AM (#39407369)

Try google.com, last month: https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/252500737/google...

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Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by lucianbr on Sunday February 18, 2024 @10:37AM (#39419882)

Look at all the comments insisting that the way Microsoft does it is the correct, superior way. How could we do away with it then?

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