And it would be a shame if Firefox didn't implement something, even so minor like a new version number, 'just' because sites break. You are Mozilla, send them a mail and give them a week to fix it, because you are f'ing Mozilla. I'm glad this is apparently just what they did here.
(Same thing when NVIDIA or Microsoft do contortions to support broken games. You already fixed the function or shader; don't hotpatch it but send it to the vendor and tell them to merge it or else...)
Mozilla has a user-base of like 3%.
They don't have any clout at all. They should be grovelling to and thanking any website that bothers to support them, not trying to give ultimatums.
> don't hotpatch it but send it to the vendor and tell them to merge it or else...
But this is a user-hostile approach. No thanks.
Except it is very common. Back before FF included DRM (optional) I couldn't get Netflix on Linux FF. But if I switched the UA string to FF Windows or Linux Chrome I could watch it. Contacted Netflix and they said "we don't use UA strings to block people." But it isn't just Netflix. I've seen this happen many times with many different websites (no problems since DRM is enabled on FF).
I don't disagree with you, but the amount of people doing "something wrong" is staggering. And it isn't just the little guys.
Also, Mozilla is what, 3.45%? I don't think people care unless you're Chrome or Safari (combined are ~85%).
Mozilla's response was to roll back the change instead of blaming the users. The alternative was letting Firefox lose market share to Chrome because the websites people wanted to use didn't work. At least one major e-commerce website (Flipkart) was actively losing sales because of the bug.
Mozilla trying to strongarm people into using web features the "right" way sounds like something Google would do.
I think you vastly overestimate Mozilla's clout on the internet these days.
Opera did that when version went up from 9 to 10. Too many websites looked at first digit of version rather that doing feature discovery back then.
Useragent string of Opera 12 is "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.18".
Safari even froze its UA string to help against browser fingerprinting (giving less bits of information).
Unfortunately it is still the only way to somewhat distinguish browsers without using javascript.
Not unlike certain CPU and GPU makers. Frankly, I am surprised any of this is still matters. Guess I am still just an old an naive summer child
Of course Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version ever in Apple OSX style, but now we have beta for Windows 11. The lesson is: never trust what Microsoft tells you about their intentions.
Personally I believe they wanted to avoid Windows NEIN, or it's some marketing BS to jump a number and pull up to OS X (10).
} else if (osName.startsWith("Windows")) {
if (osName.indexOf("9") != -1) {
jvm = WINDOWS_9x;
[1] https://github.com/Elblonko/kepler/blob/48618dc2233781656e63...Fortunately, they've got some runway before Windows 30 brings back the same problem.
Luckily for future people they already can't run those old 16 bit programs. The 64 bit transition finally put the last nail in that coffin.
• Windows 95 reports its version as “3.95” even though it's really version 4
• Windows 10, of course
With 10 they decided to stop telling applications the latest version number unless they opt in via some special token not known in advance.
> Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:93.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/1930.0
Edit: a blast from the past - an early Nightly Build post from Peter(6) on mozillazine - http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=102633