Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 0:14 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

They should take a page out of the TLS 1.3 book and randomise the order of the components in the string. Or just randomise it or remove it entirely.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 7:48 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (5 responses)

Sure, if you don't mind the browser not working on a huge number of sites.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 7:59 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (4 responses)

If browsers all did that, yes, a huge number of sites would have to be fixed once but after that the web ecosystem would be one step closer to sanity.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 12:44 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, a huge number of sites would have to be fixed, which means an enormous cost across the tens of millions of companies and hobbyists who have to debug and update their sites that would otherwise be working perfectly fine, and an enormous cost across the billions of users who will find that some sites they visit are broken for weeks or months or forever. It seems rather unethical for browser developers to collude and force that cost onto everyone else, when the main benefit is some abstract feeling of 'sanity' in one minuscule portion of the technology.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 21:22 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

Just out of curiosity, what kinds of things are browser UA sniffing used for these days? Wasn't there a push for feature detection years ago (i.e., testing if `window` or whatever has a specific attribute)?

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 18, 2022 18:38 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

Part of the problem is that feature detection has been used for browser fingerprinting, so you need to be very careful about exactly what features you allow the site to detect.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 18, 2022 20:18 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Sure. However, "Firefox on Linux" seems like way more bits of information than (I suspect) most feature detections would give over time (as "yes, supported" creeps its way across the browser/feature matrix). It is also something that changes in a way that can't necessarily be seen as I upgrade or switch browsers.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 10:08 UTC (Thu) by cthart (guest, #4457) [Link] (5 responses)

I'm with pabs here. Just bump the verison to 100 and let the fallout happen. We need to have more changes like this happen more regularly for folk to realise that they can't just make assumptions, and to learn from our past mistakes. We have a whole generation of programmers now that didn't have to deal with Y2K and they also need to learn its lessons.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 12:29 UTC (Thu) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (4 responses)

Will websites care? "Firefox can't render our site? Just use Chrome."

Will users care? "Site works in Chrome, doesn't work in Firefox? I'll just use Chrome then! Firefox must be a bad browser."

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 12:30 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (3 responses)

The post says that Chrome is coming up on version 100 too, and has also enabled the same option as Firefox.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 23:39 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Then people would just take Chromium (or Firefox) sources and release version which “works”.

Remember how that happened with Flash last year?

With Flash that was a stop-gap solution because Flash required so many hacks in different parts of browser that it wasn't really practical to forward-port the change.

When you only need to change UA string… that “extra-compatible” browser can be supported for a very long time.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 18, 2022 10:20 UTC (Fri) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (1 responses)

> When you only need to change UA string…

Aren't there simpler ways to accomplish that than recompiling the browser from source (which, if used by end-users outside of an intranet managed by an IT department, would presumably also require the end-users to download & install the resulting "alternate version" of the browser)? Such as: using Firefox's "general.useragent.override" setting in about:config, or using a Chrome extension or a Firefox add-on.

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 18, 2022 13:59 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

No need to recompile from source, a hex editor is all you need to change the User-Agent string.