Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 21:22 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse by excors
Parent article: Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

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)?

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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.