Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Partial freezing of the User-Agent string (#467)

One specific concern have about this proposal has to do with how "minority browsers" are impacted. Let's consider non-Chrome browsers that are also based on Chromium (as one aspect of browser diversity). It's not clear to me from reading the explainer how you intend non-Chrome browsers based on Chromium to make themselves known through Client Hints. If a hypothetical Chromium-based browser, let's call it Zamzung Zinternet, sends `Sec-CH-UA: "Chrome"; v="70"` (for example) that might match up with the Chromium engine they are shipping, but it won't line up with the feature set (since their feature set may not exactly match the chromium engine number) and web site owners will lose all the analytics to understand which browsers their users are using. However, if they send `Sec-CH-UA: "Zamsung Zinternet"; v="17.6"` then it's very likely that many web sites will give their users a bad user experience, or flash a message up encouraging people to download Chrome. You mentioned [on this thread](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink-dev/-2JIRNMWJ7s/yHe4tQNLCgAJ) that "The UA-CH design is trying to tackle this by enabling browsers to define an easily parsable set of values, that will enable minority browsers to be visible, while claiming they are equivalent to other browsers" however I don't see that reflected in the explainer. Can you be more explicit about this? Secondly, regarding analytics, have you validated this approach with your own Google Analytics team, who currently use the UA to extract this information?

Please note, the TAG's [ethical web principles](https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/ethical-web-principles/#multi) argues that there is an inherent value of having multiple browsers. We should not be introducing a change the web platform that could result in making browser diversity less apparent / less measurable, as this could negatively impact browser diversity.

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Received on Saturday, 1 February 2020 17:41:36 UTC