It’s time to get rid of user-agent strings that declare anything other than desktop, mobile, or html version.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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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.
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.
Oh no, they'd have to list more than one link,the horror!
The vast majority of people would have no clue what to download.
Let them be confused. They'll learn eventually. Or they won't. Computers are too user friendly today anyway.
Fuckin oath. If we cater to the stupid too much the folks who are middling just get lazy. Make people think. It’s important that we know how to use our brains.
Microsoft hides their links if they see you run linux. So you need to manually set your OS in the browser settings to see the download link. Very convenient.
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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".
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If I was a Firefox dev I'd start looking into building in user agent spoofing right into the browser.
It already opens Facebook pages in a special isolated tab. They could have apple.com open in it's own special "safari" tab. I wonder if there's anything preventing them from doing that. I guess it could be bad because it would make their market share appear even smaller.
The irony of Firerfox officially agent spoofing while everyone else uses some variant of "Mozilla" as their UAS is too much.
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User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.
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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:
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It's especially moronic that Cloudflare thinks everyone using Tor is trying to DDOS every site.
Do you know how fucking slow Tor is? You couldn't DDOS an Arduino with it.
Probably because there are A LOT of people using that tor exit node that have visited that site recently. So, cloudflare sees it as a potential DDOS
Onion sites get DDOS attacks constantly. That's why Dread has so many backup links.
afaik, cloudflare has an option to disallow tor traffic. so the website owner decided they don't want tor
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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.
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.
Not better. No one thinks anything is better, just that we don't have a choice but to take what they serve.
I remember using Netscape (my Google keyboard didn't know that word) before Firefox and SeaMonkey. I mostly used SeaMonkey to edit HTML and Firefox for my casual browsing.
Those of us who had to develop websites and make them even vaguely functional in IE6 haven't forgotten.
Dark times, those were.
I get the joke but I don't have any problems visiting websites. Neither with firefox nor with mull
Go to https://business.apple.com/#/main/users
Reset your user agent string. It will tell you that your browser is unsupported. Switch your user string to chrome and everything will function as expected.
IT people probably run into more problems with non-chromium browsers.
Edit: it has to be visited on a desktop regardless. ABM does not like mobile browsers.
IT person here, Firefox works fine for everything that matters.
That's highly subjective. At our org there's a reason our baseline deployment for workstation images comes with both Chrome and Firefox. We have thousands of users across dozens of specialties (HR, logistics, scientists, engineers, etc) and they all have a multitude of web apps they use day to day. Some of those don't like Chrome or Firefox. Hell, we even had to support god damn IE11 for way too long before Microsoft thankfully forced its death by discontinuing security support (our cybersecurity people ban anything that doesn't have active vendor support with very few exceptions).
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My wife was recently in school. Almost all the services she used decline to render unless you're using Chrome.
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my company give choice to use Firefox and Chrome and it is mandatory to install those browsers on those computers. But, 95% use Chrome.
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Brave isn't doing much better with captchas lately due to having adblocking built in, google is just on a crusade against anyone blocking stuff.
It's so absurd. It feels like half of the websites out there actively don't want me to visit them.
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