10 ms·

I have JS turned off and still have plenty of other factors that make me unique so it's not just JS. My question is why is the rest of the information available

by mnm1 7y ago

I have JS turned off and still have plenty of other factors that make me unique so it's not just JS. My question is why is the rest of the information available / given, especially the user agent? The other headers mostly make sense. I can see the argument to turn 'do not track' off. But user agent? I've been making websites and apps for almost a quarter century and have never even read of a good use for that outside the tracking industry, let alone seen a good use of it.

eric_cc 7y ago
How much of the internet still functions with JavaScript turned off?
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  The best parts imho.
jes5199 7y ago
didn’t Chrome recently announce that they’re going to freeze the user-agent string?
- shakna 7y ago
  Yes, but also expose the information through: + A new set of optional HTTP headers + A new JS API
ClikeX 7y ago
User-agents can be used for web-servers to differentiate between bots/crawlers and actual human beings. But there could be a generic user-agent instead of the ones we have now. Note: This only matters for bots that serve to aid your website. Like search engine crawlers being given instructions what pages to ignore.
- Jamwinner 7y ago
  Most crawlers/bots, particularly the ones you want to be able to identify, spoof their user agent, making this mostly moot.
jefftk 7y ago
I've written code several times that relies on user agent parsing to know whether it needs to work around a bug: * Chrome on iOS started sending "webp" on it's Accept header when it didn't support inline webp yet. * Firefox would take CSPs applied to same-origin IFrames and additionally apply them to the parent document. * Edge wouldn't accept data URLs for IFrames that were more than 4096 characters. In all of these cases the bug was eventually fixed, but we needed to work around the bug in the meantime. UA parsing to say "if it's Edge < v76" or whatever was the best way to do this.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Why the hell do you need data URLs for iframes?
  - jefftk 7y ago
    If you want to render untrusted content, cross-origin IFrames are a great way to do it. A data: url gives you an cross origin context without a network round trip and with fewer issues than using the sandbox attribute.
Kaze404 7y ago
I've used the user agent at work before. We were building something similar to Googles app store for a telecom, and we used it to know which file to serve to the user when they clicked download. Since we supported all kinds of phones (including old ones that used Java files for games), we couldn't just serve an apk file.

by mnm1 7y ago

eric_cc 7y ago

How much of the internet still functions with JavaScript turned off?

arminiusreturns 7y ago
The best parts imho.

jes5199 7y ago

didn’t Chrome recently announce that they’re going to freeze the user-agent string?

shakna 7y ago
Yes, but also expose the information through: + A new set of optional HTTP headers + A new JS API

ClikeX 7y ago

User-agents can be used for web-servers to differentiate between bots/crawlers and actual human beings. But there could be a generic user-agent instead of the ones we have now. Note: This only matters for bots that serve to aid your website. Like search engine crawlers being given instructions what pages to ignore.

Jamwinner 7y ago
Most crawlers/bots, particularly the ones you want to be able to identify, spoof their user agent, making this mostly moot.

jefftk 7y ago

I've written code several times that relies on user agent parsing to know whether it needs to work around a bug: * Chrome on iOS started sending "webp" on it's Accept header when it didn't support inline webp yet. * Firefox would take CSPs applied to same-origin IFrames and additionally apply them to the parent document. * Edge wouldn't accept data URLs for IFrames that were more than 4096 characters. In all of these cases the bug was eventually fixed, but we needed to work around the bug in the meantime. UA parsing to say "if it's Edge < v76" or whatever was the best way to do this.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
Why the hell do you need data URLs for iframes?
- jefftk 7y ago
  If you want to render untrusted content, cross-origin IFrames are a great way to do it. A data: url gives you an cross origin context without a network round trip and with fewer issues than using the sandbox attribute.

Kaze404 7y ago

I've used the user agent at work before. We were building something similar to Googles app store for a telecom, and we used it to know which file to serve to the user when they clicked download. Since we supported all kinds of phones (including old ones that used Java files for games), we couldn't just serve an apk file.