Client hints or client lies?
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@edwardp said in Client hints or client lies?:
Is this CH, Client Hints??
Yes. The "Sec" part is to help servers filter them.
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My platform rarely references the HTTP user agent header however I actually program everything professionally and maintain very balanced policies:
My platform looks at the user agent initially looking for outdated browsers which include Trident/IE17, Gecko/Firefox 43 and older, Blink/Chrome 48 and older and unfortunately all versions of Opera since Opera never got to supporting CSS variables and provides an upgrade page with a detailed list of available browsers to choose from.
Of course if the user changed their user agent intentionally then the site will load though will clearly have issues. So you CAN lie and use a non-supported browser as a technical user however you'll find out very quickly there are many reasons why I don't support older rendering engines (and therefore browsers). The upgrade page does reference advanced users.
This is wildly different from many other websites. In example until my own email module is completed I still have to rely on Yahoo Mail. I use Waterfox Classic as my primary browser and have been using Vivaldi on an increasing basis as a secondary though there are still a lot of GUI issues that need to be resolved in order to make it my primary. Any way, Yahoo Mail will gladly accept Safari 3 on mobile though not a much newer version of a Gecko browser. I simply have to reload the page and it'll accept it for about a month or two, annoying though survivable until I get my email module working.
There is more...uh, non-professional code out there than professional code on the web. I rarely find myself having to change the user agent however I'm probably not visiting a lot of the websites you folks are. That being said looking at the user agent for anything more than trying to help non-technical users who just fired up a 15 year old computer is playing with fire and any user, technical or not, would be fully justified in closing the website and not coming back.
If a website tells me to use a different browser as someone who has built an entire website platform from scratch I'll close that tab and look for what I need elsewhere. Testing only one browser and going out of the way to enforce such a suicidal "policy" is just an advertisement of incompetence and disrespect to user choice.
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@edwardp: Ditto. I have written many letters in the past (when I was more healthy & active) to sites that would not support Opera (<13) and Vivaldi.
Those that replied said it would be too much work :-o. -
@greybeard said in Client hints or client lies?
Those that replied said it would be too much work :-o.
And that is their loss...
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Would be cool to have an option for a "HTTP Purist mode" that just does things right regardless of what breaks. I'd rather just not use services that are actively holding the web back through their incompetence and maybe even annoy them a bit to fix their stuff if they accept bug reports.
It's sad that the average browser user won't be on board with a "It's the site that's broken" approach, because they really should be. It's not even that hard to build a proper parser for these things anyway. An evening and a box of pizza worth of development time at most in any sane language. (Then again, last time I checked not even Rails supported
q=in accept headers, so maybe that's just too much to ask) -
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@greybeard: How hard would it be to create a banner saying "We support browser X, Y, and Z. If you use any other browser, use it at your own risk, we cannot help with bugs."?
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@sisisisi Vivaldi does have banners available (or used to).
I use one on my Wordpress site mentionining that "I am a Proud Vivaldi User" or somettthing similar.
I've since lost the link to the banners but I'm sure someone has it if they are still available. -
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@greybeard said in Client hints or client lies?:
@sisisisi Vivaldi does have banners available (or used to).
I use one on my Wordpress site mentionining that "I am a Proud Vivaldi User" or somettthing similar.
I've since lost the link to the banners but I'm sure someone has it if they are still available.Different kind of banner - sisisisi was suggesting websites should post a warning banner instead of blocking you when they don't recognise your browser... not that they should post a fanboi banner that they support Vivaldi!
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A great post only now discovered!
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Great article! Thank you!
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By forcing "minor" browsers to lie about who they are, the big browsers can lie and point to their now inflated usage numbers and pat themselves on the back about how successful they are.
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Is there a setting in Vivaldi that the user can choose to make the browser identify as Vivaldi? This way, if we encounter web pages that makes this a problem, we can flag this to the (in)responsible web site admins. Making this a user setting (that defaults to identify as Chrome), the user can turn this to Vivaldi - knowing the risks of doing that.
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@waldo There is. Search for UA-CH in settings and set as vivaldi. Just keep in mind will break several sites and most webmonsters simply won't bother to fix the issues.
Vivaldi Stable+Snap | Patience Is The Key To Get The Vivaldi Spree | Unsupported Extensions | Github | windows 11 | Manjaro KDE | Q4OS Trinity | Android 13
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@hadden89: Thanks.
When searching for UA-CH in the Vivaldi settings there was no match. I Changed to just UA, and found it. It is CH-UA - not the other way around... -
@jabcreations: You should never ban browser based on anything. You should code your web site to test for support of each feature you use instead of test for which browser you think support the feature. For CSS it should degrade gracefully to show a bare minimum as default for browsers that don't support variables.
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Why do you not include anything in userAgent string to indicate Vivaldi? I see that Microsoft Edge includes Edg/... and Opera includes OPR/... at the end in addition to all those that you report in Vivaldi. This would help make Vivaldi be visible in statistics to show how many users you actually have. Once you include Chrome and Safari like you do, it will not hurt to add your own in addition?
