this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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It’s time to get rid of user-agent strings that declare anything other than desktop, mobile, or html version.
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.
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".
Well their job is to block weird bot-looking traffic...
what is more likely to be a bot? a unique and trackable useragent for a semi-niche browser engine, or a vanilla Chromium+Windows which half of everyone uses ?