As usual, this will fuck up the users, and not the techy nerds making such decisions, but the average joe because things on the internet will be broken for them.
How will things be broken? Google is not removing the user agent, they're just freezing it. So all sites that currently depend on the user agent will continue to do just fine. New sites can use client hints instead, which are a much more effective replacement for user agent sniffing.
This solution very specifically places the burden on "techy nerds" and not users, so I'm not sure where you're coming from.
Right, using user agent on the client side has been unsalvageably broken for a long time. Other things, like checking the existence of window.safari or window.chrome are more reliable.
For the server side, I’m not too aware of too many cases it’s useful other than analytics, and there is too much info leakage and fingerprinting happening anyway.
So killing user agent doesn’t really seem user-hostile, save for the fact that the company doing it has near monopoly market share and doesn’t need to provide a user agent, as it’s assumed that everyone is writing code to run on Google’s browser. In that sense it’s a flex.
This last year I've been noticing things breaking on the Internet for me here and there. I'm a Firefox user. This really wasn't the case in most of the past decade.
This kinda reminded me of the late 00's. It was quite common that the odd government or enterprise website was IE6 only.
I use Safari with no plugins. Even Disney World has a broken website for buying tickets for me. The web is breaking because it's gotten way too complex and the fight against trackers is leading to random failures of things that used to work.
The web is breaking because we are reaching the point where developers are able to assume WebKit/Blink and get away with it. It is imperative that technical folk adopt Firefox to hold back the tide.
Which is a shame, but I would lay the blame squarely at the feet of the team who built a checkout that throws errors when their analytics events don't fire. QA should really include a manual run w/ an adblocker...
Thats true, but its quite likely that simply testing on a couple available browsers and avoiding browser specific checks means that safari (and other non mainstream browser) users will be fine.
There aren't really that many actual standards compliance differences between most browsers, the real problem is all the undefined garbage they are forced to run. Back when I ran a html/css/javascript validator in my browser it frankly shocked me the number mainstream sites that weren't even delivering valid html/css/javascript. In my experience developing a pretty dynamic web site (actually it was a management front-end for a rather complex application) most of our browser differences were caused by bugs that went away simply by providing correct code.
I had Build-A-Bear not work for me on Firefox at the checkout process. Had to switch to Chrome to make the purchase. But aside from that, I typically don't see any issues.
Seems they considered this issue and created a work-around:
>While removing the User-Agent completely was deemed problematic, as many sites still rely on them, Chrome will no longer update the browser version and will only include a unified version of the OS data.
Instead of relying on a user agent which doesn't tell the entire story web site developers will need to check whether or not a feature exists in a browser before using it.
