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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 25 2020, @06:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-user-agent-are-belong-to-us dept.

Chrome Phasing out Support for User Agent

Google announced its decision to drop support for the User-Agent string in its Chrome browser. Instead, Chrome will offer a new API called Client Hints that will give the user greater control over which information is shared with websites.

[...] When Netscape came out,[...] it adopted the User-Agent string and added additional details such as the operating system, language, etc. These details helped websites to deliver the right content for the user, though in reality, the primary use case for the User-Agent string became browser sniffing.

[...] Browser sniffing continued to play a significant part in determining the browser capabilities for many years, which led to an unfortunate side effect where smaller browser vendors had to mimic popular User-Agents to display the correct website - as many companies only supported the major User-Agent types.

With JavaScript popularity rising, most developers have started using libraries such as Modernizer, which detects the specific capabilities of the browser, as this provides much more accurate results.

As a result, the most significant usage for the User-Agent remained within the advertising industry, where companies used it to 'fingerprint' users, a practice that many privacy advocates found to be problematic - mainly as most users had limited options to disable/mask those details.

If advertisers (other than Google) are unable to fingerprint our browsers we might be condemned to having fewer ads on our web pages to watch.

[A more in-depth article is available on ZDNet; the entire Client Hints proposal is available on GitHub. This is subject to modification — but it has been under development since at least January of 2019 — so don't wait for it to get formally adopted if you have any issues with it; get your feedback in soon.-Ed.]


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @06:28PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @06:28PM (#975558)

    Anyone have a good Bobby Tables style user agent string? I don't think most ad networks run the highest quality code...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @07:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @07:22PM (#975576)

    Use a blank string and watch the fireworks.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @08:11PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @08:11PM (#975589)

    Googlebot

    Gets around many paywalls.

    A zillion years ago, I used to use "web browser", but as time went on, most major sites became broken due to retarded user agent sniffing. Most did not degrade gracefully, just some stupid, "We haven't a clue what we are doing, so please use browser X at version Y."

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday March 26 2020, @12:46AM (2 children)

      by Pino P (4721) on Thursday March 26 2020, @12:46AM (#975656) Journal

      Googlebot

      Gets around many paywalls.

      Shhh! Don't spill the beans, or sites will start using reverse DNS on each IP address that presents a Googlebot UA [google.com].

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by toddestan on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:35AM (1 child)

        by toddestan (4982) on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:35AM (#975713)

        Really, this shouldn't work for other reasons. I think Google should send sites that let Googlebot through but present a paywall to everyone else straight to the bottom of their search results.

        • (Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:54AM

          by Pino P (4721) on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:54AM (#975717) Journal

          I think Google should send sites that let Googlebot through but present a paywall to everyone else straight to the bottom of their search results.

          This was the case until October 2017, when Google rolled out Flexible Sampling [google.com] to replace its former First Click Free policy. Googlebot even provides a way for publishers to post structured data to mark the difference [google.com] between a paywall and cloaking.