3 ms·

Why not just break them?

• vertex-four 12y ago
  Because then people use a competing browser that doesn't break the sites they use.
  • drdaeman 12y ago
    Seriously doubt it. Backwards-incompatible changes (mostly, deprecating some old kludges) had happened many times and I don't think there were any severe migrations. I'm really not sure cons of User-Agent cleanup (or complete deprecation) outweigh the pros. At the very least I think it's not obvious and is debatable.
    • cbr 12y ago
      What are the pros? Smaller requests are only going to have a very small effect on speed or bytes used.
      • drdaeman 12y ago
        Smaller requests, right. Also, some privacy improvements by having less data for browser fingerprinting. Also, if we'd consider dropping User-Agent header altogether, less ways to detect an UA, so a bit harder to show "sorry, your browser in unsupported, this site is IE^H^H Chrome-only" Obviously, just UA header isn't even remotely sufficient for any of those reasons, but would be a good start.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• markbnj 12y ago
  It's not our call. We run a specialty aggregating search engine for a certain class of professionals, and the sites we pull data from were mostly developed when Clinton was president, as far as I can tell. We had a set of probably ten or fifteen sites that just wouldn't work right until we added "like Gecko" to the UA. Like I said, it would have been funny if we hadn't been tearing our hair out trying to figure out why the postback call wasn't firing.