Re: Migrating some high-entropy HTTP headers to Client Hints.

On Mon, 3 Dec 2018, Mike West wrote:

> the entire mechanism in Fetch if this group is willing to point off in that 
> direction in a future version of RFC7231 that deprecates `User-Agent`.

I would be most curious on *how* we would go ahead and actually deprecate 
User-Agent for real on the web. Just saying it in a document like that won't 
be enough.

I'm sure that removing that header in requests will break the experience on N% 
of the world's web sites, which I doubt browsers would like to impose on their 
users. I expect that nobody will remove this header until such an action is 
likely to only cause an insignificant amount of user pain, and the same time 
the world's web sites with all their user-agent sniffing logic are unlikely to 
actually swich to CH as long as the vast majority of the browsers keep sending 
User-Agent headers... The good old depcrecating things on the web dilemma.

Or are there reasons to believe this time will be different?

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se

Received on Monday, 3 December 2018 10:05:45 UTC