4 ms·

What incentive does anybody have to be honest about their user agent?

• tbrownaw 2y ago
  It's useful in the few cases where UAs support different features in ways that the standard feature-detection APIs can't detect. I think that's supposed to be fairly rare these days.
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    That's not supposed to happen anymore. (AFAIK, it was never supposed to happen, it just happened without people wanting it to.) Instead, today there are different sets of features supported by engines with the same user agent.
• jkrejcha 2y ago
  It's good etiquette, for one, and encouraging good etiquette (both on the parts of website operators and website requestors) is a good thing. As a website operator, I've actually increased ratelimits for a service I ran , from a particular crawler, that's normally much more stringent just because it was the easiest way to identify the people crawling and I liked what they were doing. I know some web services effectively require you not to lie about your user agent (this applies more to APIs, but they'll block or severely ratelimit user agents that are browser-like or are generic "requests" or what have you).