Do we, as an industry, have such short attention span, that we forgot how Microsoft abused their monopoly in the 1990s to force everyone to use Internet Explorer? Now that Google is doing the exact same thing, nobody seems to mind.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Because the tech gigacorporations have literally spent the last three decades brainwashing us into accepting shit like that and even convincing us that it's better this way.
It’s time to get rid of user-agent strings that declare anything other than desktop, mobile, or html version.
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.
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 ?
Actually, the top one is the logo of the chromium browser engine, but the bottom one is not the logo of the Gecko browser engine. That's the logo of SpiderMonkey, Firefox's Javascript engine (Chromium uses V8).
This is the logo for Gecko:
Firefox doesn't even use Gecko anymore, it uses Quantum. I think it still uses spidermonkey though.
It's "how it feels" or "what it feels like", not "how it feels like"
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