8 ms·

The worst is that just changing the user agent makes everything work.

Bigpet 7y ago
Yeah, I've been doing the same thing. Although I only use it for text chatting in the browser. I don't know if video or audio calls work with it.
- hawski 7y ago
  Video calls do work. There is an extension, that will change the UA only for Skype: https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-web-skype/ https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-web-skyp...
  - userbinator 7y ago
    There are plenty of extensions that will let you change the UA for any site; having yet another one with such a narrow function seems to me like those "we have a smartphone app too" whose only purpose is to open the browser to their site.
    - hawski 7y ago
      But if it's your only use of such a thing, as it is for me, it's just one click away. You can also feel reasonably safe as the extension works only on Skype's web sites per Web Extension manifest.
    - andrewshadura 7y ago
      Just add this to your prefs.js/about:config user_pref("general.useragent.override.web.skype.com", "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36");
userbinator 7y ago
I always thought having a UA header in the HTTP spec was a bad idea, because it just encourages things like this. Unfortunately, I've tried browsing with no UA header, and a surprisingly large number of sites --- even ones without any sort of "app functionality" --- will return strange errors.
- avian 7y ago
  Because it's such a rare corner case. I've been running my blog for 10+ years and apparently I've never seen a request without the UA header - until a post got to the front page of HN a while back and someone like you caused a bunch of "Use of uninitialized value" errors in my logs. It's fixed now.
- amaccuish 7y ago
  Actually that's a really good idea to move things towards checking compatibility with standards rather than by user agent. The hard job would be forcing these broken sites to fix themselves. UPDATE: the idea below of Safari not updating it's UA seems to be a good way to move this forward.
mcv 7y ago
Are we back to the "built for Netscape 4.7" days? Sites shouldn't support browsers, but standards. By all means check if a browser supports a certain standard, and provide an error message for browsers that are too far behind, but don't ban them simply for having the wrong user agent.
- Spivak 7y ago
  This is a nice sentiment but for actual products you end up having to say X versions of Y browsers are supported. It ends up being a feature requested by customer support teams that you prevent the app from working on unsupported browsers because users don’t read banners or pop ups and it generates pointless tickets. If you make your users change their UA there’s an awareness that things might break.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    'unsupported browsers' are browsers that are old or broken. FireFox is a perfectly good browser, it is current and should be supported.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      It's not really about that -- most shops don't support the latest version of Opera or Brave except by accident since they're Chromium backed. If they introduced a breaking incompatbility there is very little chance we would carry patches for them. 'supported browsers' are browsers that you lose customers if you don't support. You don't lose customers by telling them to switch to Chrome. Firefox's market share is small and the number of people who exclusively use Firefox and refuse to switch is vanishingly small.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        > 'supported browsers' are browsers that you lose customers if you don't support. That's a great attitude towards your users. No, you, the vendor, adapt to what your users bring. That is the standard that the web was built around. Lazy developers that only wish to cater to the one browser that they have on their desk and that refuse to recognize that the world is a bit larger than their minimal view (including screenreaders and other accessibility device) should get another job. And if the company they work at is run competently they will (Microsoft apparently is not one of those, but that's not really news either).
taneq 7y ago
I was going to say "Great, so Chrome/X.X is going to be the new Mozilla/4.0" but then looked it up and apparently Chrome already reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36" so what even is a user agent string for?
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  > what even is a user agent string for? Tracking. Safari actually stopped updating its user agent for this reason.
- dTal 7y ago
  Obligatory classic: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
  - michaelanckaert 7y ago
    Great resource, thanks for sharing!
  - taneq 7y ago
    That was brilliant, thanks!
dhimes 7y ago
It's not trivial though- I had to put open a tab in a container for it to recognize the new UA. Just changing and reloading didn't work.
Carpetsmoker 7y ago
Facebook "kind of" works in Firefox, but there's loads of subtle breakage: for example pasting anything in Messenger (with ctrl+v) breaks the entire site for me. Middle-click kind-of but kind-of-doesn't work, depending on planetary alignments or some such :-/
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  That's odd, and I'd be more inclined to blame a plugin than Firefox itself. I'm Firefox all day, every day, and my job revolves around Facebook, without that sort of issue.
  - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
    I only have uBlock and disabling it makes no difference. It's been broken like this for at least ~6 months (possibly longer, but I don't use Facebook much).
- taneq 7y ago
  What? I've been using Facebook in Firefox since IE6 stopped being cool, and it's always worked fine.
  - lostgame 7y ago
    IE6 was cool? (j/k - I do remember the years where it was actually alright, before it became the plague on the dev community it evolved into)
    - taneq 7y ago
      So you understand how long I've been using Firefox, then. :P (And yeah, compared with Netscape 4, IE6 was great!)
- GoToRO 7y ago
  This is what I got... https://www.facebook.com/i.valentin.maxim/videos/10219098431034525/?t=6 https://www.facebook.com/i.valentin.maxim/videos/10219098431...
gregdoesit 7y ago
As above, I was on the Skype for Web launch team. While chat will probably work, as it doesn't have anything browser-specific, I am not sure video/audio calls will be reliable. Even if they work now, that flow is no longer tested or fixed if it breaks on Firefox. The downloadable video/audio plugin on Windows and Mac, supporting Firefox is the expensive part that the team likely stopped supporting.
- lostgame 7y ago
  It's said often, but this is why I love HN - when the folks who actually work at these companies can provide insight. Because what we are seeing certainly seems malicious - the idea that it can work by changing the user header looked, at least to me, as a swipe to Firefox, but instead, you're explaining that you simply couldn't guarantee support. Now, it would be cool if you could simply just state that on the page, instead of simply saying it won't work - but I do understand the desire to not present something with potential issues to the general public. Thanks for taking the time, here.
  - godelski 7y ago
    People here aren't really asking for support. They are complaining that they are locked out. Specifically targeted. They get that an error might exist on an unsupported browser. What they are mad about is that they are explicitly locked out, and for seemingly no purpose.
  - gregdoesit 7y ago
    I was on the team who built this, five years ago. I left Microsoft about that time ago. I don't have information on how and why decisions are being made now. Having worked at Microsoft though, if your team cannot guarantee that a feature works on a browser that uses some non-standard things, is a decision that product will make on how to proceed. Display a warning or just don't support? Perhaps there might be security issues in the future the company wants to avoid this way, knowing they could not patch it? And so on. Beyond speculation, I don't have much more to offer.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
Asooka 7y ago
Not completely. Pasting in chat crashes the site. The new twitter UI has the same problem, so it's probably something in React or whatever common DOM library they use.
JeremyNT 7y ago
There has been so much loving praise of Microsoft on hn lately, while they would continue to use their same old tricks. A similar case is MS Teams, which won't enable audio or video on Firefox Linux without spoofing the ua as well. This is especially insidious since so many companies are already locked into the MS ecosystem, users have no choice but to use edge or chrome and IT departments will start wondering why they would bother allowing the use of Firefox at all.
- cies 7y ago
  Agreed. This is shameful behavior, and we should call 'm out on this.
boring_twenties 7y ago
Slack is guilty of this as well. They support Firefox obviously, but if you try to connect with a niche browser like Waterfox you get a great patronizing message about how it's for your own good and they only want to provide you the "best experience possible." The best part is that the default Waterfox user-agent begins with an unmodified copy of the Firefox one (which is allowed), with " Waterfox/X.Y." appended to it.

Yeah, I've been doing the same thing. Although I only use it for text chatting in the browser. I don't know if video or audio calls work with it.

hawski 7y ago
Video calls do work. There is an extension, that will change the UA only for Skype: https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-web-skype/ https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-web-skyp...
- userbinator 7y ago
  There are plenty of extensions that will let you change the UA for any site; having yet another one with such a narrow function seems to me like those "we have a smartphone app too" whose only purpose is to open the browser to their site.
  - hawski 7y ago
    But if it's your only use of such a thing, as it is for me, it's just one click away. You can also feel reasonably safe as the extension works only on Skype's web sites per Web Extension manifest.
  - andrewshadura 7y ago
    Just add this to your prefs.js/about:config user_pref("general.useragent.override.web.skype.com", "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36");

userbinator 7y ago

I always thought having a UA header in the HTTP spec was a bad idea, because it just encourages things like this. Unfortunately, I've tried browsing with no UA header, and a surprisingly large number of sites --- even ones without any sort of "app functionality" --- will return strange errors.

avian 7y ago
Because it's such a rare corner case. I've been running my blog for 10+ years and apparently I've never seen a request without the UA header - until a post got to the front page of HN a while back and someone like you caused a bunch of "Use of uninitialized value" errors in my logs. It's fixed now.
amaccuish 7y ago
Actually that's a really good idea to move things towards checking compatibility with standards rather than by user agent. The hard job would be forcing these broken sites to fix themselves. UPDATE: the idea below of Safari not updating it's UA seems to be a good way to move this forward.

mcv 7y ago

Are we back to the "built for Netscape 4.7" days? Sites shouldn't support browsers, but standards. By all means check if a browser supports a certain standard, and provide an error message for browsers that are too far behind, but don't ban them simply for having the wrong user agent.

Spivak 7y ago
This is a nice sentiment but for actual products you end up having to say X versions of Y browsers are supported. It ends up being a feature requested by customer support teams that you prevent the app from working on unsupported browsers because users don’t read banners or pop ups and it generates pointless tickets. If you make your users change their UA there’s an awareness that things might break.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  'unsupported browsers' are browsers that are old or broken. FireFox is a perfectly good browser, it is current and should be supported.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    It's not really about that -- most shops don't support the latest version of Opera or Brave except by accident since they're Chromium backed. If they introduced a breaking incompatbility there is very little chance we would carry patches for them. 'supported browsers' are browsers that you lose customers if you don't support. You don't lose customers by telling them to switch to Chrome. Firefox's market share is small and the number of people who exclusively use Firefox and refuse to switch is vanishingly small.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      > 'supported browsers' are browsers that you lose customers if you don't support. That's a great attitude towards your users. No, you, the vendor, adapt to what your users bring. That is the standard that the web was built around. Lazy developers that only wish to cater to the one browser that they have on their desk and that refuse to recognize that the world is a bit larger than their minimal view (including screenreaders and other accessibility device) should get another job. And if the company they work at is run competently they will (Microsoft apparently is not one of those, but that's not really news either).

taneq 7y ago

I was going to say "Great, so Chrome/X.X is going to be the new Mozilla/4.0" but then looked it up and apparently Chrome already reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36" so what even is a user agent string for?

Nextgrid 7y ago
> what even is a user agent string for? Tracking. Safari actually stopped updating its user agent for this reason.
dTal 7y ago
Obligatory classic: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
- michaelanckaert 7y ago
  Great resource, thanks for sharing!
- taneq 7y ago
  That was brilliant, thanks!

dhimes 7y ago

It's not trivial though- I had to put open a tab in a container for it to recognize the new UA. Just changing and reloading didn't work.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago

Facebook "kind of" works in Firefox, but there's loads of subtle breakage: for example pasting anything in Messenger (with ctrl+v) breaks the entire site for me. Middle-click kind-of but kind-of-doesn't work, depending on planetary alignments or some such :-/

ceejayoz 7y ago
That's odd, and I'd be more inclined to blame a plugin than Firefox itself. I'm Firefox all day, every day, and my job revolves around Facebook, without that sort of issue.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  I only have uBlock and disabling it makes no difference. It's been broken like this for at least ~6 months (possibly longer, but I don't use Facebook much).
taneq 7y ago
What? I've been using Facebook in Firefox since IE6 stopped being cool, and it's always worked fine.
- lostgame 7y ago
  IE6 was cool? (j/k - I do remember the years where it was actually alright, before it became the plague on the dev community it evolved into)
  - taneq 7y ago
    So you understand how long I've been using Firefox, then. :P (And yeah, compared with Netscape 4, IE6 was great!)
GoToRO 7y ago
This is what I got... https://www.facebook.com/i.valentin.maxim/videos/10219098431034525/?t=6 https://www.facebook.com/i.valentin.maxim/videos/10219098431...

gregdoesit 7y ago

As above, I was on the Skype for Web launch team. While chat will probably work, as it doesn't have anything browser-specific, I am not sure video/audio calls will be reliable. Even if they work now, that flow is no longer tested or fixed if it breaks on Firefox. The downloadable video/audio plugin on Windows and Mac, supporting Firefox is the expensive part that the team likely stopped supporting.

lostgame 7y ago
It's said often, but this is why I love HN - when the folks who actually work at these companies can provide insight. Because what we are seeing certainly seems malicious - the idea that it can work by changing the user header looked, at least to me, as a swipe to Firefox, but instead, you're explaining that you simply couldn't guarantee support. Now, it would be cool if you could simply just state that on the page, instead of simply saying it won't work - but I do understand the desire to not present something with potential issues to the general public. Thanks for taking the time, here.
- godelski 7y ago
  People here aren't really asking for support. They are complaining that they are locked out. Specifically targeted. They get that an error might exist on an unsupported browser. What they are mad about is that they are explicitly locked out, and for seemingly no purpose.
- gregdoesit 7y ago
  I was on the team who built this, five years ago. I left Microsoft about that time ago. I don't have information on how and why decisions are being made now. Having worked at Microsoft though, if your team cannot guarantee that a feature works on a browser that uses some non-standard things, is a decision that product will make on how to proceed. Display a warning or just don't support? Perhaps there might be security issues in the future the company wants to avoid this way, knowing they could not patch it? And so on. Beyond speculation, I don't have much more to offer.
tinus_hn 7y ago

Asooka 7y ago

Not completely. Pasting in chat crashes the site. The new twitter UI has the same problem, so it's probably something in React or whatever common DOM library they use.

JeremyNT 7y ago

There has been so much loving praise of Microsoft on hn lately, while they would continue to use their same old tricks. A similar case is MS Teams, which won't enable audio or video on Firefox Linux without spoofing the ua as well. This is especially insidious since so many companies are already locked into the MS ecosystem, users have no choice but to use edge or chrome and IT departments will start wondering why they would bother allowing the use of Firefox at all.

cies 7y ago
Agreed. This is shameful behavior, and we should call 'm out on this.

boring_twenties 7y ago

Slack is guilty of this as well. They support Firefox obviously, but if you try to connect with a niche browser like Waterfox you get a great patronizing message about how it's for your own good and they only want to provide you the "best experience possible." The best part is that the default Waterfox user-agent begins with an unmodified copy of the Firefox one (which is allowed), with " Waterfox/X.Y." appended to it.