On 26 April 2018 at 14:25, Ali Juma <ajuma@chromium.org> wrote:
It's worth noting that https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182629 added back the OS version to the UA string, at least on trunk (the reasons given there, in https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182629#c6, sound exactly like those mentioned by Colin in this thread).
Thanks for the catch. I had missed this commit. This is helpful. On 26 April 2018 at 15:40, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro@igalia.com> wrote:
I would say it's the most serious web compatibility problem that exists today. Our users complain and blame us when important websites are broken in WebKit because of it. I have personally wasted days [1] of [2] development [3] effort [4] playing with WebKit's user agent quirks to get important websites to work properly.
Yea, I get that. The current state of the UA is terrible. It's really an archeological map of browser evolution. It's like going on a first-date and the first thing you talk about is your family tree, and how great-grandpa-andreesen who is all but estranged from the family. It is a tad embarrassing :) On 26 April 2018 at 15:40, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro@igalia.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 12:48 PM, Colin Bendell <colin@bendell.ca> wrote:
Again I ask, is there room for compromise where we can expose the version details in the UA (or some alternative) so that we ensure a consistent and optimized user experience?
I don't know. I wish there was, but I don't think so. If you have any suggestions, that'd be great, but I think it's going to be extremely difficult or impossible to solve this problem in a way that makes everyone happy.
I was only partially joking about the need for a UA2 spec. Perhaps it is time to bring this to one of the w3c working groups. I'll take it off this thread though :) /colin