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This is incompetent behaviour. (I'm sure someone from Google will now argue no no it's malice not incompetence!!) If they're worried about capabilities, test
by davidgerard 7y ago
This is incompetent behaviour.
(I'm sure someone from Google will now argue no no it's malice not incompetence!!)
If they're worried about capabilities, test on capabilities.
Filtering on user-agent strings - which is what they seem to be doing - is the act of an incompetent, and it doesn't matter how big the company is.
Can Google not hold on to competent people any more?
- solarkraft 7y agoI am absolutely certain that the intention is malice - but it's incompetent malice. It weakens their brand every time, making users either think that they're bad at building products, or hate them for trying to force them into their (stupid) ecosystem.
- shadowgovt 7y agoThere have been quite a few threads on HN about why Google uses a combination of capability and UA sniffing. The tl;dr is it's the Wild West out there and both approaches are unreliable (also, capability testing requires pushing more code than the client can use and harms latency).