Re: [#232] User-Agent Guidelines (proposal)

On 20/09/2010, at 7:24 PM, Adam Barth wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 2:14 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
>> Likewise, implementations are encouraged not to use the product tokens of other implementations in order to declare compatibility with them, as this circumvents the purpose of the field.
> 
> Although noble, many implementations will ignore this advice.  I can
> tell you that there are several folks in the Chromium project that are
> adamant about fixing the User-Agent mess, but they're crushed by the
> compatibility requirements.  In particular, including the token
> "Safari" in Chrome's User-Agent string is massively important to
> making the browser actually work in the real world.

Yes, I think that's probably the most tenuous part of the proposal -- and one reason why it's just "encouraged." 

OTOH, if things are really that dire, maybe we should standardise the value to start with "Mozilla/4.0" and just move on ;)

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Monday, 20 September 2010 09:27:41 UTC