Mozilla tests if 'Firefox/100.0' user agent breaks websites (opens in new tab)

> You are Mozilla, send them a mail and give them a week to fix it, because you are f'ing Mozilla.

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.

> If you are using user-agent for anything other than statistics, you are likely doing something wrong...

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%).

I'd like to see you implement SameSite=None cookies without user agent sniffing. Still pisses me off that a bunch of browser vendors decided to break backwards compatibility so badly you're literally forced to sniff for user agents

https://catchjs.com/Blog/SameSiteCookies

There is still a possibility that Mozilla's improvements can break backwards compatibility. One time they attempted to improve Firefox's error message for undefined property accesses in JavaScript, but it caused breaking changes because some websites relied on parsing the old error message format.

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.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1488417

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19492660

"Attention all employees: Chrome is the only approved browser for accessing HR websites. Please DO NOT use Firefox for accessing HR websites."

The other valid use case is blacklisting buggy browser versions. Some browsers will claim to support a feature but it doesn't actually work (e.g. indexeddb in some versions of safari). The only way to detect is using the user agent.

> You are Mozilla, send them a mail and give them a week to fix it, because you are f'ing Mozilla.

I think you vastly overestimate Mozilla's clout on the internet these days.

Half the problem is that the user agent string is insane and almost impossible to parse other than having a big list of every possible string.

Of course, anything that has a remote possiblity of affecting ads, popups and content block screens would adversely affect revenue.

We detect IE to show a banner saying to upgrade. I assume some sites like google search do so they can support literally every browser. I was shocked to find out IE 8 on a fresh windows xp vm was able to use google search without any issues.

It strikes me as plausible. If the devs thought that Microsoft was going to keep their year based naming system then it wouldn't be a problem for another 100 years, by which point they would be long dead and it would be someone else's problem. The fact that there were two versions to check also meant that the shortcut of only checking the first digit is understandable. Also, if the version strings included extra cruft, like Windows 98SE2 then stopping the check early makes sense over trying for explicit string matches.

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.

None of the native APIs return the version number as a string, and to see a version > Vista you need to declare the minimum supported version anyway. But I can see this being a problem in some scripted languages, maybe.

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).

They've never confirmed it, but yes, that was the strong suspicion at the time.

Fortunately, they've got some runway before Windows 30 brings back the same problem.

This sort of problem has happened more than once at Microsoft:

• 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.

Firefox2 0.0.1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28154187