[webkit-dev] New iOS versions sending bogus User-Agent build data

[Colin Bendell]

On 26 April 2018 at 14:25, Ali Juma <ajuma at 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 at 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 at igalia.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 12:48 PM, Colin Bendell <colin at 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