[webkit-dev] User agent woes

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Konstantin Tokarev <annulen at yandex.ru> 
wrote:
> Maybe they just assume this traffic is coming from bots, and this 
> conflict
> can be resolved by simply informing them about existence of other 
> WebKit
> ports?

I think we should not contact sites that present unsupported browser 
warnings, like Whatsapp. Their interest is in ensuring that users don't 
use browsers they haven't tested, and there is no question they're 
doing it intentionally, because that's exactly what their big "use 
another browser" landing page says. If many sites start doing this, 
that could put us out of business, and would be a huge problem for 
embedded device manufacturers. It's better for us to just not say 
anything, so long as our quirk continues to work. That said, testing 
Whatsapp right now, it seems the user agent quirk is no longer enough: 
it's failing due to lack of WebCrypto support. That's an actual 
legitimate reason to block us, so OK. Maybe they have switched from 
user agent checks to feature checks. We should reevaluate if this quirk 
is still needed after enabling WebCrypto.

Testing Slack right now, it works perfectly fine with our standard user 
agent. I think this quirk can be removed.

Michael