<story><title>Blink-Dev – Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent string</title><url>https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink-dev/-2JIRNMWJ7s/yHe4tQNLCgAJ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sebazzz</author><text>User agent sniffing is still sometimes required. Take the SameSite bugs that Safari had. On the server you needed to act on that based on User Agent sniffing.</text></item><item><author>ChrisSD</author><text>&amp;gt; On top of those privacy issues, User-Agent sniffing is an abundant source of compatibility issues, in particular for minority browsers, resulting in browsers lying about themselves (generally or to specific sites), and sites (including Google properties) being broken in some browsers for no good reason.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The above abuse makes it desirable to freeze the UA string and replace it with a better mechanism.&lt;p&gt;UA sniffing should have died out a long time ago. It&amp;#x27;s frustrating that it&amp;#x27;s 2020 and I&amp;#x27;m still having my browsing experience broken for no other reason than the site doesn&amp;#x27;t like my UA.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xfalcox</author><text>&amp;gt; SameSite bugs that Safari had&lt;p&gt;Safari has SameSite bugs and it&amp;#x27;s infuriating that after years they don&amp;#x27;t even update the bug reports, let alone fix those.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bugs.webkit.org&amp;#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=200345&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bugs.webkit.org&amp;#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=200345&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Blink-Dev – Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent string</title><url>https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink-dev/-2JIRNMWJ7s/yHe4tQNLCgAJ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sebazzz</author><text>User agent sniffing is still sometimes required. Take the SameSite bugs that Safari had. On the server you needed to act on that based on User Agent sniffing.</text></item><item><author>ChrisSD</author><text>&amp;gt; On top of those privacy issues, User-Agent sniffing is an abundant source of compatibility issues, in particular for minority browsers, resulting in browsers lying about themselves (generally or to specific sites), and sites (including Google properties) being broken in some browsers for no good reason.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The above abuse makes it desirable to freeze the UA string and replace it with a better mechanism.&lt;p&gt;UA sniffing should have died out a long time ago. It&amp;#x27;s frustrating that it&amp;#x27;s 2020 and I&amp;#x27;m still having my browsing experience broken for no other reason than the site doesn&amp;#x27;t like my UA.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vdnkh</author><text>Agreed. For media streaming UA sniffing is required because of quirks each browser has in decoding media. Safari has a few quirks about the MP4 packaging it likes via MediaSourceExtensions. Firefox&amp;#x27;s network stack includes a delay not related to the actual request because of its implementation[0] which makes timing of small downloads very inaccurate. None of these differences are discernible except by UA.&lt;p&gt;[1] I believe FF includes in the download length the time a request spends sitting in the request queue, but I can&amp;#x27;t exactly remember.</text></comment>