The future of device detection on the web

Added: 2024-04-06 13:11, Author: st, Category: Development

The future of device detection on the web

Andrzej Betts is a member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group - he writes on the Fastly website about changes in the UA for detecting devices. Example of old UA: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 - This is absolute madness. I'm not using "Mozilla" (at least not in the sense it refers to here!), my Mac does not contain an Intel chip, and the browser is not powered by WebKit, nor KHTML, nor Gecko. It is not Safari.

The one single correct piece of information in this header value is "Chrome/120.0.0.0". The rest is pure theater intended to try and improve compatibility with naive filters.

Google initiated the User-Agent reduction program - is a compromise between providing a measure of useful information, and not providing so much specific data that a user ends up being unique. You can check how unique your own browser is at amiunique.org.