Posted Apr 3, 2012 4:18 UTC (Tue) by scientes (guest, #83068)
[Link]
but do you realize that this gets send, UNcompressed, for EVERY SINGLE request? Such a long user-agent is a large overhead when it's usefulness to the web is dubious at best, and, through promoting bad coding, often harmful.
Epiphany: the minimalist GNOME browser
Posted Apr 3, 2012 9:53 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link]
It's the price of doing business on the web these days. There still exist broken sites that use the User-Agent header for anything other than logging.
Epiphany: the minimalist GNOME browser
Posted Apr 5, 2012 8:35 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link]
It is fun to use the Firefox/Iceweasel User Agent Switcher to disable sending the User-Agent header and see what issues come up. There are some websites that produce tracebacks when doing that. Most annoying is that mediawiki sites require the User-Agent header to be set. For them I send "W3C standards are important. Stop obsessing over user-agent already.".
Posted Apr 5, 2012 8:51 UTC (Thu) by scientes (guest, #83068)
[Link]
I've definitely done this sort of thing, back in the day. I ended up just setting my user agent to that of Firefox mainline on Windows XP, cause that was the most common user agent, sans IE 7, which would get differn't behavior.
I did never run across this mediawiki thing you talk about, but if so, that is totally sad, considering mediawiki is FOSS.
Epiphany: the minimalist GNOME browser
Posted Apr 5, 2012 23:08 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link]
"Scripts should use an informative User-Agent string with contact information, or they may be IP-blocked without notice."
Epiphany: the minimalist GNOME browser
Posted Apr 9, 2012 9:28 UTC (Mon) by Nikerabbit (subscriber, #59780)
[Link]
You are barking at the wrong tree :) The linked page clearly states it is a policy about Wikimedia sites, not about the MediaWiki software. And yes, the names are confusingly similar.
Epiphany: the minimalist GNOME browser
Posted Apr 11, 2012 21:32 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link]
Unfortunately they seem to have hard-coded that policy in mediawiki, so sites like http://libreplanet.org/ have the same issue.