this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
332 points (89.5% liked)
Firefox
17832 readers
16 users here now
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Browser detection is rarely done through User Agent lookup anymore. Nowadays we determine browser through feature detection.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Browser_detection_using_the_user_agent#avoiding_user_agent_detection
And yet in this case if I change my agent to any non-FF value while using FF, videos load immediately.
I set my agent back to FF, 5 second delay.
Yeah, but some amount of the time is just easier to rely on the user agent. Why bother with the fancy logic when user agent spoofing, adblocking Firefox users is a % of a % of a %?
I tend to agree. I think there's little need as a developer to go that extra mile for accurate browser detection without UA unless it's for fingerprinting. Most feature sets are supported and where it isn't you have a polyfil or whatever shim to make it work. So in the case of fingerprinting you try not to rely fully on anything the user can alter easily.
How so?
Oh wow. This is a really bad script
Course it is, GPT made it.
.
Doesn't matter what's the best way to do it in reality. UA is easily a possibility for any website. Nothing stopping it