Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 7:48 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
In reply to: Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse by pabs
Parent article: Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

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

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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.