<story><title>Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent</title><url>https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/03/chrome-phasing-user-agent/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ShamelessC</author><text>This is off topic but do you know why Edge is the only browser to support DRM for streaming? Or is that incorrect?&lt;p&gt;I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.</text></item><item><author>currysausage</author><text>If you have the new Chromium-based Edge (&amp;quot;Edgium&amp;quot;) installed: the compatibility list at edge:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;compat&amp;#x2F;useragent is really interesting.&lt;p&gt;Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;[Edit] Here is the full list: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pastebin.com&amp;#x2F;YURq1BR1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pastebin.com&amp;#x2F;YURq1BR1&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>jorams</author><text>The weird thing about this is that the only company I&amp;#x27;ve seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user agent sniffing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jgunsch</author><text>Other browsers support DRM too, but with different tradeoffs.&lt;p&gt;Chrome uses Widevine, but one of Chrome&amp;#x27;s philosophies is that you should be able to wipe a Chrome install, reinstall Chrome, and have no trace that before&amp;#x2F;after are the same person. That means no leveraging machine-specific hardware details that would persist across installs. &amp;quot;Software-only DRM&amp;quot;, essentially.&lt;p&gt;Edge on Windows (and Safari on OSX) are able to leverage more hardware-specific functionality --- which from a DRM perspective are considered &amp;quot;more secure&amp;quot;, but the tradeoff is a reduction of end-user anonymity (i.e. if private keys baked into a hardware TPM are involved).&lt;p&gt;Last I checked, Chrome&amp;#x2F;Firefox were capped at 720p content, Safari&amp;#x2F;Edge at 1080p, though it looks like Edge is now able to stream 4k.</text></comment>
<story><title>Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent</title><url>https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/03/chrome-phasing-user-agent/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ShamelessC</author><text>This is off topic but do you know why Edge is the only browser to support DRM for streaming? Or is that incorrect?&lt;p&gt;I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.</text></item><item><author>currysausage</author><text>If you have the new Chromium-based Edge (&amp;quot;Edgium&amp;quot;) installed: the compatibility list at edge:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;compat&amp;#x2F;useragent is really interesting.&lt;p&gt;Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;[Edit] Here is the full list: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pastebin.com&amp;#x2F;YURq1BR1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pastebin.com&amp;#x2F;YURq1BR1&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>jorams</author><text>The weird thing about this is that the only company I&amp;#x27;ve seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user agent sniffing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrandm</author><text>I am not sure about Edge specifically, but as someone who tries to use mostly open source software: Digital Rights Management (DRM) requirements often directly conflict with licensing related to open source software.</text></comment>