this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
10 points (100.0% liked)
Firefox
17942 readers
18 users here now
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s time to get rid of user-agent strings that declare anything other than desktop, mobile, or html version.
The biggest offender is, surprisingly, cloudflare. They will straight up refuse to serve you any site if your user agent is not one of the mainstream ones. It's not even "find the traffic light to prove you're human", but a page basically saying "fuck you, go away".
Well their job is to block weird bot-looking traffic...
what is more likely to be a bot? a unique and trackable useragent for a semi-niche browser engine, or a vanilla Chromium+Windows which half of everyone uses ?
99% of sites only need to know your screen aspect ratio and maybe available input devices, can't think of a good reason to share anything else
Knowing OS is useful for download links.
Oh no, they'd have to list more than one link,the horror!
I’d be down for an ask to allow that info. Sort of like how sites request access to cam and mic.
Before Windows 10, NVidia and others had this button Detect what thing suits me best on their websites. Now many of them just look it up in one's fingerprint without asking.