12 ms·

The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released sev

by jorams 7y ago

The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user agent sniffing.

jaywalk 7y ago
I'm sure Google won't build in some proprietary way for them to identify Chrome. /s
- true_religion 7y ago
  I mean they already did. The goal is to replace user agent parsing with a simple field that says exactly what browser and version this is.
  - ric2b 7y ago
    You mean like a user-agent string? Gee, I wonder how this is going to end: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
eh78ssxv2f 7y ago
Google is probably so big that we might as well consider Chrome and rest of the Google as separate entities.
- blitmap 7y ago
  I hear what you're saying, but they pay people enough to follow a potential company-wide policy: Don't f-ck with user agents!
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    It's easier to change the thing you're in charge of than it is to make a new company-wide policy.
- tmpz22 7y ago
  I’ve started seeing alphabet employees use this as an excuse: “oh that happened on team x there’s nothing I could’ve done”. On small technical issues the excuse is fine - on large moral issues it does not work.
  - dtech 7y ago
    In large corporations politics are abound. If the Chrome division cannot get other divisions to behave through other means, this is fine. You can see that they should have fought harder and escalated, but issues like this are probably not the ones most upper-middle management want to potentially damage their career for.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      It's not fine, but it's certainly to be expected.
- untog 7y ago
  You can see Chrome devrels on Twitter expressing disappointment with Chrome-only web sites, saying that they raise the issue internally. Of course we have no visibility into what happens after that, but it's an indicator that you're right.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    I’m guessing all of Google’s internal apps are only tested on Chrome, with plenty of Chrome extensions, which means that all of the developers have to use Chrome to make the tools work, and at that point, switching back and forth between different browsers is a pain so none of the other browsers get the love they deserve. The attitude of “it works on Chrome, I don’t care about anything else” is fairly widespread anyway. Just to stem the tide a little bit I’ve been developing on Firefox and Safari first, and then checking Chrome last. I got bitten before when I made a browser game, and then noticed that it was all sorts of broken on Edge, even though Edge supposedly had all the features I needed. It turns out that Edge did have all the features I needed, but I had accidentally used a bunch of Chrome features I didn’t need. The easy way out is to turn things off when I detect Edge. The hard way is to find all the broken parts and fix them. So nowadays, I don’t do any web development in Chrome.
    - Tyr42 7y ago
      At least in my part of the googleverse, we have automated tests running in all the browsers (even ie11). But I'll admit I will also poke around outside of the tests, and I'll usually only be doing that in chrome, unless I've had a bug report about firefox in particular. And I'll only really open up Safari when I'm testing VoiceOver. ChromeVox just isn't good enough.
      - klodolph 7y ago
        Oh, I’m sure there are automated tests. But if you have 50,000 developers using Google Docs in Chrome, they’re gonna submit some high-quality bug reports internally, whenever it breaks.
    - dhimes 7y ago
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  this is exactly the opposite of what we should do when they degrade experiences of competing browsers!
rovek 7y ago
I had been thinking recently as I've been using Firefox more that Google maps had got clunky. With a little fiddling prompted by your comment, it turns out Maps sniffs specifically to reduce fluid animations on Firefox (and probably some other browsers).
- numpad0 7y ago
  I had been having an issue with Google Sheets and Firefox that the app decides to change row height randomly. On Firefox only. Obvious solution to which being...
  - yingw787 7y ago
    Oh wait...THAT might be the problem?? I've been having that issue too! I have to cut the cell content, delete the cell, and then paste the cell content back in in order for the row height to appear the same. It never even occurred to me to switch browsers, I thought it was an issue with Google Sheets.
    - spand 7y ago
      Same except it stopped not long ago. Maybe they fixed it ?
      - yingw787 7y ago
        Maybe. Still not switching away from Firefox though. I have Chrome installed because WebRTC is a lot better and teleconferencing needs have shot up recently, and because I lock my phone away in a Kitchen Safe and use 2FA with Authy the Chrome app, but Firefox is my daily driver :)
      - mmis1000 7y ago
        https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069?hl=en They do, I'm not sure that should be called as a 'fix' though. Because it even works perfectly on firefox as long as you spoof your useragent to chrome.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. This seems like a pretty good reason in itself why they might be interested in phasing out User-Agents.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  It's the exact opposite. Without User-Agents, sites need to depend on feature detection, and closing the feature discrepancy between Chrome and other browsers is more complicated than just spoofing your UA to get Google to serve you functioning versions of their products.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    I don't quite follow your comment. I'm saying, the hypothetical flow from Google is: 1. Our Chrome detection relies on the User-Agent header. 2. But people can just lie in the User-Agent header. 3. Let's get rid of it and use something that's harder to lie about. Closing any feature discrepancy isn't a goal here, as far as I can see. The whole point is to lie to the user that a feature discrepancy exists when it doesn't. You can make the argument that Google is free to do their browser detection however they want (and therefore doesn't need to solve this problem by eliminating User-Agents), but this is still an obvious example of the User-Agent header causing problems for Google.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    This is going to end up being the IE of Google, funny that it is also a browser (Chrome).
    - myko 7y ago
      That's the opposite of what is happening though
      - sitkack 7y ago
heavyset_go 7y ago
Some Google properties are broken on Chromium, even.
currysausage 7y ago
If you have the new Chromium-based Edge ("Edgium") installed: the compatibility list at edge://compat/useragent is really interesting. Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn't. [Edit] Here is the full list: https://pastebin.com/YURq1BR1 https://pastebin.com/YURq1BR1
- ShamelessC 7y ago
  This is off topic but do you know why Edge is the only browser to support DRM for streaming? Or is that incorrect? I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.
  - 8K832d7tNmiQ 7y ago
    Simply because Netflix uses Playready DRM for 4k streaming, which is even harder to bypass and requires WinRT API (?) to even able to use the recent version. Currently only Microsoft itself even try to implement it on their own Chromium-based browser.
  - jrandm 7y ago
    I am not sure about Edge specifically, but as someone who tries to use mostly open source software: Digital Rights Management (DRM) requirements often directly conflict with licensing related to open source software.
  - colde 7y ago
    Not the only browser to support DRM. But the only browser to support PlayReady on Windows, which brings added security compared to what Widevine offers on Windows. Another popular choice for high quality is Safari on macOS because it implements Apple's FairPlay.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Wait, Netflix et al use FairPlay in Safari on macOS? I'm surprised, because Fairplay is publicly crackable.
rocky1138 7y ago
Facebook also uses the user-agent string to determine which version of a site to send to someone. I installed a user-agent spoofer a while back and messenger.com would fail due to it every few refreshes (as evidenced by JS console).
rozab 7y ago
I know Netflix used to block the Firefox on Linux user agent for no reason
- jeroenhd 7y ago
  Not for a technical reason, but they had a reason: they provided no support or guarantee that Netflix would ever work on Linux + FF (Ubuntu + Chrome was guaranteed) and they didn't want any support calls for something that they wouldn't help people with anyway. A lot of stuff gets blocked for this reason. The company doesn't want you calling them because HD video doesn't work on Firefox even though you pay for HD quality, they do not test or guarantee Firefox compatibility in the slightest and yet they have to talk to an angry customer now. It makes business sense to redirect people to supported use cases when you know your product probably won't work as intended otherwise. You don't have to agree with the decision (and you can always cancel your membership if you do) but they had their reasons.
  - _eht 7y ago
    > and they didn't want any support calls for something that they wouldn't help people with anyway. Even knowing what they were doing, I fielded at least two support requests asking what was going on. I can only hope I wasn’t the only one. Now that everything plays nicely I just happen to have no interest in Netflix for other reasons...
  - ric2b 7y ago
    Why not a banner saying that it's not supported and may have issues? You might lose customers if you simply block them from using it at all.
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
I would guess they have built something into chrome that gets even more data that isn't user-agent based. UA has a lot of limitations and is fairly easy to work around giving data to for power users. I would imagine Google didn't want to keep playing around with that.
- josefx 7y ago
  > I would guess they have built something into chrome that gets even more data that isn't user-agent based. Chrome includes a unique installation id in requests to Google owned domains. They don't need any cookies or user agents to guess who you are and best of all they don't have to share that information with their competition. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106
fpoling 7y ago
The things that replaces the user agent will still be enough to differentiate Chrome from Firefox and Safari.
blntechie 7y ago
Every single Google product is slower on Firefox and it’s hard to not call this malice and artificial. Many people check out Gmail and GMaps on Firefox and go back to Chrome because of their clunkiness on Firefox.
- iso1631 7y ago
  I try out google products on occasion and find them rubbish compared with alternatives, so go back to non-google products.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Regarding google properties what do you prefer and why?
    - iso1631 7y ago
      Google maps does tend to be better than OSM when it comes to route finding, I use !gm when I want routing. On my phone I use apple maps though. Gmail is painful compared with OWA (work) and zoho (home), I stopped using my gmail account for new stuff about a year ago.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        I prefer mu4e (mu for email) although ultimately I'm still using my gmail account just with another interface. I like the idea of ultimately just setting up a mail server but realistically its really really hard to switch everything at once when you have a lot of existing accounts so I'll probably be maintaining a gmail account forever. I'm trying maps.me because unlike google it does offline walking directions but I haven't used it enough. I really want to like duck duck go but it feels like google still provides better results.
        iso1631 7y ago
        > I really want to like duck duck go but it feels like google still provides better results. I find I get better results with ddg than google. YMMV I guess.
sergiotapia 7y ago
"Oopsie" said Google to Firefox.
basscomm 7y ago
> The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. I frequently consume web articles with a combination of newsboat + Lynx, and it's astounding how many websites throw up HTTP 403 messages when I try to open a link. They're obviously sniffing my user agent because if I blank out the string (more accurately, just the 'libwww-FM' part, then the site will show me the correct page. I'm pretty sure that the webmasters responsible for this are using user agent string blocking as a naive attempt to block bots from scraping their site, but that assumes that the bots that they want to block actually send an accurate user agent string the first place.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > I'm pretty sure that the webmasters responsible for this are using user agent string blocking as a naive attempt to block bots from scraping their site, but that assumes that the bots that they want to block actually send an accurate user agent string the first place. That is exactly what they are doing, and it works really well. We blocked user agents with lib in them at reddit for a long time. Any legit person building a legit bot would know to fake the agent string. The script kiddies would just go away. It drastically reduced bot traffic when we did that. Obviously some of the malicious bot writers know to fake their agent string too, and we had other mitigations for that. But sometimes the simplest solutions solve the majority of issues.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    Yes perhaps. But it caused problems for regular users like this fellow. I also have tried various 'download via script' for web pages for offline use. I thought I had a problem on my end, I never realized I could have been getting blocked.
    - naasking 7y ago
      Hard to argue with the economics of that mitigation though. The abuse:legitimate use ratio is probably pretty high. Getting rid of user agent strings will bring back the scaling problems, as they should probably be addressed directly.
asveikau 7y ago
A fair number of websites will still block perfectly working features based on what OS you use. Some examples I've seen using the latest Firefox on *BSD: Facebook won't let you publish or edit a Note (not a normal post, the builtin Notes app). I think earlier they wouldn't play videos but they might have fixed that. Chase Bank won't let you log in. Gives you a mobile-looking UI which tells you to upgrade to the latest Chrome or Firefox. In these cases if you lie and say you're using Linux or Windows it works flawlessly.
- ksec 7y ago
  I am guessing Banks only test their site against popular OS and Browser for security reasons.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    I think you mean their broken idea of what a security reason is. Banks are generally really bad at actual web and mobile security.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Ok then, don't tell all the other financial institutions I use FreeBSD then, they are all letting me through without issue. It sounds a lot like you are making excuses for them and bad/lazy/poorly thought out code.
  - whoisthemachine 7y ago
    It's usually just that the company doesn't want to have to deal with potential support calls that come in about their website not working on x os in x browser, so they do the bare minimum to disable it - then if a user complains about it not working, they can plausibly deny supporting the os/browser configuration.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      This takes more effort than letting it just work. People running an OS more obscure than Linux are not the type that are going to call asking for support. We are used to supporting ourselves. Did I mention it's the same code as a working configuration? I think it's more likely somebody did not know how to properly parse user-agent and they blocked more than they intended to.
arendtio 7y ago
Ikea does it too with some of their tools (just sucks).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dhimes 7y ago
Exactly. This is going to turn into a game of whack-a-mole whereby we need to load the latest firefox extension that tricks websites into thinking we're using Chrome. Or we could build for Firefox. There's always that.
jacobolus 7y ago
Here in Safari, Gmail is not only 10x buggier than it used to be before the redesign, it also uses at least 10x more client-side resources (CPU, network, ...). A handful of open Gmail tabs single-handedly use more CPU over here than hundreds of other web pages open simultaneously, including plenty of heavyweight app-style pages. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Google’s front-end development process is completely incompetent and has no respect for customers’ battery or bandwidth.
- specialist 7y ago
  I recently learned about Superhuman. Via the Acquired podcast. Not a recommendation; I haven't used Superhuman. But I remain astonished there's an apparently very successful startup who's entire effort is a "pro" webmail client for gmail. It would have never occurred to me to create a better webmail. As I reach my greybeard years, I'm increasingly aware that I've been doing everything wrong.
  - elevenoh 7y ago
    Superhuman looks nice. >I'm increasingly aware that I've been doing everything wrong. Any theme to this?
cdata 7y ago
Chrome team members are face-palming with the best of us whenever a Google product does backwards things like filtering based on user agent string. Google isn't a singularity ️
willvarfar 7y ago
To get Microsoft Teams to run in Chromium there used to be a user-agent hack to make it pretend to be Chrome. This was superseded by someone packaging up using Electron. And finally this has been superseded by Micrsoft themselves supporting Linux using something that looks and feels like Electron again. So, basically, Microsoft using user-agent to detect Chrome....
otabdeveloper2 7y ago
> ...which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Which is probably why Google wants to phase out the user agent. For sure whatever Google invents to replace it will not be so easily circumvented.

by jorams 7y ago

jaywalk 7y ago

I'm sure Google won't build in some proprietary way for them to identify Chrome. /s

true_religion 7y ago
I mean they already did. The goal is to replace user agent parsing with a simple field that says exactly what browser and version this is.
- ric2b 7y ago
  You mean like a user-agent string? Gee, I wonder how this is going to end: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

eh78ssxv2f 7y ago

Google is probably so big that we might as well consider Chrome and rest of the Google as separate entities.

blitmap 7y ago
I hear what you're saying, but they pay people enough to follow a potential company-wide policy: Don't f-ck with user agents!
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  It's easier to change the thing you're in charge of than it is to make a new company-wide policy.
tmpz22 7y ago
I’ve started seeing alphabet employees use this as an excuse: “oh that happened on team x there’s nothing I could’ve done”. On small technical issues the excuse is fine - on large moral issues it does not work.
- dtech 7y ago
  In large corporations politics are abound. If the Chrome division cannot get other divisions to behave through other means, this is fine. You can see that they should have fought harder and escalated, but issues like this are probably not the ones most upper-middle management want to potentially damage their career for.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It's not fine, but it's certainly to be expected.
untog 7y ago
You can see Chrome devrels on Twitter expressing disappointment with Chrome-only web sites, saying that they raise the issue internally. Of course we have no visibility into what happens after that, but it's an indicator that you're right.
- klodolph 7y ago
  I’m guessing all of Google’s internal apps are only tested on Chrome, with plenty of Chrome extensions, which means that all of the developers have to use Chrome to make the tools work, and at that point, switching back and forth between different browsers is a pain so none of the other browsers get the love they deserve. The attitude of “it works on Chrome, I don’t care about anything else” is fairly widespread anyway. Just to stem the tide a little bit I’ve been developing on Firefox and Safari first, and then checking Chrome last. I got bitten before when I made a browser game, and then noticed that it was all sorts of broken on Edge, even though Edge supposedly had all the features I needed. It turns out that Edge did have all the features I needed, but I had accidentally used a bunch of Chrome features I didn’t need. The easy way out is to turn things off when I detect Edge. The hard way is to find all the broken parts and fix them. So nowadays, I don’t do any web development in Chrome.
  - Tyr42 7y ago
    At least in my part of the googleverse, we have automated tests running in all the browsers (even ie11). But I'll admit I will also poke around outside of the tests, and I'll usually only be doing that in chrome, unless I've had a bug report about firefox in particular. And I'll only really open up Safari when I'm testing VoiceOver. ChromeVox just isn't good enough.
    - klodolph 7y ago
      Oh, I’m sure there are automated tests. But if you have 50,000 developers using Google Docs in Chrome, they’re gonna submit some high-quality bug reports internally, whenever it breaks.
  - dhimes 7y ago
liveoneggs 7y ago
this is exactly the opposite of what we should do when they degrade experiences of competing browsers!

rovek 7y ago

I had been thinking recently as I've been using Firefox more that Google maps had got clunky. With a little fiddling prompted by your comment, it turns out Maps sniffs specifically to reduce fluid animations on Firefox (and probably some other browsers).

numpad0 7y ago
I had been having an issue with Google Sheets and Firefox that the app decides to change row height randomly. On Firefox only. Obvious solution to which being...
- yingw787 7y ago
  Oh wait...THAT might be the problem?? I've been having that issue too! I have to cut the cell content, delete the cell, and then paste the cell content back in in order for the row height to appear the same. It never even occurred to me to switch browsers, I thought it was an issue with Google Sheets.
  - spand 7y ago
    Same except it stopped not long ago. Maybe they fixed it ?
    - yingw787 7y ago
      Maybe. Still not switching away from Firefox though. I have Chrome installed because WebRTC is a lot better and teleconferencing needs have shot up recently, and because I lock my phone away in a Kitchen Safe and use 2FA with Authy the Chrome app, but Firefox is my daily driver :)
    - mmis1000 7y ago
      https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069?hl=en They do, I'm not sure that should be called as a 'fix' though. Because it even works perfectly on firefox as long as you spoof your useragent to chrome.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. This seems like a pretty good reason in itself why they might be interested in phasing out User-Agents.

heavyset_go 7y ago
It's the exact opposite. Without User-Agents, sites need to depend on feature detection, and closing the feature discrepancy between Chrome and other browsers is more complicated than just spoofing your UA to get Google to serve you functioning versions of their products.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  I don't quite follow your comment. I'm saying, the hypothetical flow from Google is: 1. Our Chrome detection relies on the User-Agent header. 2. But people can just lie in the User-Agent header. 3. Let's get rid of it and use something that's harder to lie about. Closing any feature discrepancy isn't a goal here, as far as I can see. The whole point is to lie to the user that a feature discrepancy exists when it doesn't. You can make the argument that Google is free to do their browser detection however they want (and therefore doesn't need to solve this problem by eliminating User-Agents), but this is still an obvious example of the User-Agent header causing problems for Google.
- sitkack 7y ago
  This is going to end up being the IE of Google, funny that it is also a browser (Chrome).
  - myko 7y ago
    That's the opposite of what is happening though
    - sitkack 7y ago

heavyset_go 7y ago

Some Google properties are broken on Chromium, even.

currysausage 7y ago

If you have the new Chromium-based Edge ("Edgium") installed: the compatibility list at edge://compat/useragent is really interesting. Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn't. [Edit] Here is the full list: https://pastebin.com/YURq1BR1 https://pastebin.com/YURq1BR1

ShamelessC 7y ago
This is off topic but do you know why Edge is the only browser to support DRM for streaming? Or is that incorrect? I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.
- 8K832d7tNmiQ 7y ago
  Simply because Netflix uses Playready DRM for 4k streaming, which is even harder to bypass and requires WinRT API (?) to even able to use the recent version. Currently only Microsoft itself even try to implement it on their own Chromium-based browser.
- jrandm 7y ago
  I am not sure about Edge specifically, but as someone who tries to use mostly open source software: Digital Rights Management (DRM) requirements often directly conflict with licensing related to open source software.
- colde 7y ago
  Not the only browser to support DRM. But the only browser to support PlayReady on Windows, which brings added security compared to what Widevine offers on Windows. Another popular choice for high quality is Safari on macOS because it implements Apple's FairPlay.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Wait, Netflix et al use FairPlay in Safari on macOS? I'm surprised, because Fairplay is publicly crackable.

rocky1138 7y ago

Facebook also uses the user-agent string to determine which version of a site to send to someone. I installed a user-agent spoofer a while back and messenger.com would fail due to it every few refreshes (as evidenced by JS console).

rozab 7y ago

I know Netflix used to block the Firefox on Linux user agent for no reason

jeroenhd 7y ago
Not for a technical reason, but they had a reason: they provided no support or guarantee that Netflix would ever work on Linux + FF (Ubuntu + Chrome was guaranteed) and they didn't want any support calls for something that they wouldn't help people with anyway. A lot of stuff gets blocked for this reason. The company doesn't want you calling them because HD video doesn't work on Firefox even though you pay for HD quality, they do not test or guarantee Firefox compatibility in the slightest and yet they have to talk to an angry customer now. It makes business sense to redirect people to supported use cases when you know your product probably won't work as intended otherwise. You don't have to agree with the decision (and you can always cancel your membership if you do) but they had their reasons.
- _eht 7y ago
  > and they didn't want any support calls for something that they wouldn't help people with anyway. Even knowing what they were doing, I fielded at least two support requests asking what was going on. I can only hope I wasn’t the only one. Now that everything plays nicely I just happen to have no interest in Netflix for other reasons...
- ric2b 7y ago
  Why not a banner saying that it's not supported and may have issues? You might lose customers if you simply block them from using it at all.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

I would guess they have built something into chrome that gets even more data that isn't user-agent based. UA has a lot of limitations and is fairly easy to work around giving data to for power users. I would imagine Google didn't want to keep playing around with that.

josefx 7y ago
> I would guess they have built something into chrome that gets even more data that isn't user-agent based. Chrome includes a unique installation id in requests to Google owned domains. They don't need any cookies or user agents to guess who you are and best of all they don't have to share that information with their competition. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106

fpoling 7y ago

The things that replaces the user agent will still be enough to differentiate Chrome from Firefox and Safari.

blntechie 7y ago

Every single Google product is slower on Firefox and it’s hard to not call this malice and artificial. Many people check out Gmail and GMaps on Firefox and go back to Chrome because of their clunkiness on Firefox.

iso1631 7y ago
I try out google products on occasion and find them rubbish compared with alternatives, so go back to non-google products.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Regarding google properties what do you prefer and why?
  - iso1631 7y ago
    Google maps does tend to be better than OSM when it comes to route finding, I use !gm when I want routing. On my phone I use apple maps though. Gmail is painful compared with OWA (work) and zoho (home), I stopped using my gmail account for new stuff about a year ago.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      I prefer mu4e (mu for email) although ultimately I'm still using my gmail account just with another interface. I like the idea of ultimately just setting up a mail server but realistically its really really hard to switch everything at once when you have a lot of existing accounts so I'll probably be maintaining a gmail account forever. I'm trying maps.me because unlike google it does offline walking directions but I haven't used it enough. I really want to like duck duck go but it feels like google still provides better results.
      - iso1631 7y ago
        > I really want to like duck duck go but it feels like google still provides better results. I find I get better results with ddg than google. YMMV I guess.

sergiotapia 7y ago

"Oopsie" said Google to Firefox.

basscomm 7y ago

> The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. I frequently consume web articles with a combination of newsboat + Lynx, and it's astounding how many websites throw up HTTP 403 messages when I try to open a link. They're obviously sniffing my user agent because if I blank out the string (more accurately, just the 'libwww-FM' part, then the site will show me the correct page. I'm pretty sure that the webmasters responsible for this are using user agent string blocking as a naive attempt to block bots from scraping their site, but that assumes that the bots that they want to block actually send an accurate user agent string the first place.

jedberg 7y ago
> I'm pretty sure that the webmasters responsible for this are using user agent string blocking as a naive attempt to block bots from scraping their site, but that assumes that the bots that they want to block actually send an accurate user agent string the first place. That is exactly what they are doing, and it works really well. We blocked user agents with lib in them at reddit for a long time. Any legit person building a legit bot would know to fake the agent string. The script kiddies would just go away. It drastically reduced bot traffic when we did that. Obviously some of the malicious bot writers know to fake their agent string too, and we had other mitigations for that. But sometimes the simplest solutions solve the majority of issues.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  Yes perhaps. But it caused problems for regular users like this fellow. I also have tried various 'download via script' for web pages for offline use. I thought I had a problem on my end, I never realized I could have been getting blocked.
  - naasking 7y ago
    Hard to argue with the economics of that mitigation though. The abuse:legitimate use ratio is probably pretty high. Getting rid of user agent strings will bring back the scaling problems, as they should probably be addressed directly.

asveikau 7y ago

A fair number of websites will still block perfectly working features based on what OS you use. Some examples I've seen using the latest Firefox on *BSD: Facebook won't let you publish or edit a Note (not a normal post, the builtin Notes app). I think earlier they wouldn't play videos but they might have fixed that. Chase Bank won't let you log in. Gives you a mobile-looking UI which tells you to upgrade to the latest Chrome or Firefox. In these cases if you lie and say you're using Linux or Windows it works flawlessly.

ksec 7y ago
I am guessing Banks only test their site against popular OS and Browser for security reasons.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  I think you mean their broken idea of what a security reason is. Banks are generally really bad at actual web and mobile security.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Ok then, don't tell all the other financial institutions I use FreeBSD then, they are all letting me through without issue. It sounds a lot like you are making excuses for them and bad/lazy/poorly thought out code.
- whoisthemachine 7y ago
  It's usually just that the company doesn't want to have to deal with potential support calls that come in about their website not working on x os in x browser, so they do the bare minimum to disable it - then if a user complains about it not working, they can plausibly deny supporting the os/browser configuration.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    This takes more effort than letting it just work. People running an OS more obscure than Linux are not the type that are going to call asking for support. We are used to supporting ourselves. Did I mention it's the same code as a working configuration? I think it's more likely somebody did not know how to properly parse user-agent and they blocked more than they intended to.

arendtio 7y ago

Ikea does it too with some of their tools (just sucks).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dhimes 7y ago

Exactly. This is going to turn into a game of whack-a-mole whereby we need to load the latest firefox extension that tricks websites into thinking we're using Chrome. Or we could build for Firefox. There's always that.

jacobolus 7y ago

Here in Safari, Gmail is not only 10x buggier than it used to be before the redesign, it also uses at least 10x more client-side resources (CPU, network, ...). A handful of open Gmail tabs single-handedly use more CPU over here than hundreds of other web pages open simultaneously, including plenty of heavyweight app-style pages. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Google’s front-end development process is completely incompetent and has no respect for customers’ battery or bandwidth.

specialist 7y ago
I recently learned about Superhuman. Via the Acquired podcast. Not a recommendation; I haven't used Superhuman. But I remain astonished there's an apparently very successful startup who's entire effort is a "pro" webmail client for gmail. It would have never occurred to me to create a better webmail. As I reach my greybeard years, I'm increasingly aware that I've been doing everything wrong.
- elevenoh 7y ago
  Superhuman looks nice. >I'm increasingly aware that I've been doing everything wrong. Any theme to this?

cdata 7y ago

Chrome team members are face-palming with the best of us whenever a Google product does backwards things like filtering based on user agent string. Google isn't a singularity ️

willvarfar 7y ago

To get Microsoft Teams to run in Chromium there used to be a user-agent hack to make it pretend to be Chrome. This was superseded by someone packaging up using Electron. And finally this has been superseded by Micrsoft themselves supporting Linux using something that looks and feels like Electron again. So, basically, Microsoft using user-agent to detect Chrome....

otabdeveloper2 7y ago

> ...which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Which is probably why Google wants to phase out the user agent. For sure whatever Google invents to replace it will not be so easily circumvented.