User-agent string changes

Re:User-agent string changes by tacostakohashi on Saturday November 22, 2014 @01:23PM (#8646197)

That's what "Mozilla/..." already is and always has been, and it obviously doesn't work. All you need is for one browser manufacturer to break the rule and advertise their new feature via something new at the end, and then everyone else who continues to play by the "standard string" rules suffers.

Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating UA strings - but to get rid of them, there needs to be an approach where there isn't a punishment for following the rules.

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Re:User-agent string changes by tracker1 on Sunday November 23, 2014 @04:03AM (#8648224)

Hell, I'd be happy if browsers sent a content and platform dimensions headers... so that I at least know the screen size, and if it's in a window, the content size that will be filled.... would make it really nice to be able to do adaptive rendering of the markup.

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Re:User-agent string changes by cpeterso on Saturday November 22, 2014 @03:01PM (#8646492)

Even removing"Mozilla/" could break UA detection that uses hardcoded string indexes to version numberz. :(

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Re:User-agent string changes by anonymfus on Saturday November 22, 2014 @03:43PM (#8646600)

Opera since 9.0 up to 12.x had user-agent without Mozilla. I still use Opera 12.17 and mostly only Google's sites are broken.

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Re:User-agent string changes by cpeterso on Saturday November 22, 2014 @09:50PM (#8647637)

Interesting! I did not know that, though I think many users would complain if "only" Google's sites were broken in browser X but not Y. :)

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