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Web dev: What browser is visiting the page?
User agent string:
A screenshot of a browser. The URL bar reads firefox://settings, a button on the URL bar is labelled Netscape, a popup from the button reads: “You’re viewing a secure Opera page”, and the web page title reads “Chrome settings”.
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“yer a jedi, harry” - Gandalf
User agents are essentially deprecated and are going to become less and less useful over time. The replacement is either client hints or feature detection, depending on what you’re using it for.
A URL is not an agent string, just saying.
Functionally useless. With the web standardized, we shouldn’t need user agents anyway. It would be more beneficial to ask “do you support X, Y, and Z?”
That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do with the modern web, via feature detection and client hints.
The user agent in Chrome (and I think Firefox too) is “frozen” now, meaning it no longer receives any major updates.
It’s called feature detection and it goes a long way back, even before Modernizr popularized it.
Popularized? That gets less than 100k downloads a week
Most developers just write their own feature checks (a lot of detections are just a single line of code) or use a library that polyfills the feature if it’s missing.
The person you’re replying to is right, though. Modernizr popularized this approach. It predates npm, and npm still isn’t their main distribution method, so the npm download numbers don’t mean anything.
Neat, thanks for clarifying! I’ve never heard of it
It used to be huge.
Web UI for touch screens is a lot different than keyboard and mouse. I still switch to desktop most of the time because the mobile site will lack critical info, though. They “have” to streamline the experience for mobile, but I hate it when they fully remove features.
Youtube currently (for weeks now) does not work on Firefox, if you don’t use a Firefox user agent. Google doing sketchy things again.
It works fine?
YouTube works fine on Firefox…
I’ve not run into this issue and use Firefox exclusively with ublock origin
I use Charmeleon, with the effects described above.
So you don’t use Firefox, you mess with Firefox. That’s on you then. Devs can’t be held responsible for you intentionally breaking things. Only do what you know works.
Lazy web developers or clueless managers have entered the chat
Is it… (scrolls wheel of browsers) Lynx?
I’m still amazed at how usable Lynx is, given the insane premise of the application.
What’s so insane about it? Web browsers are an evolution of the old gopher protocol. All this stuff has roots in text consoles.
A new browser touches the beacon
