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

> I have some experience with constructing user agent strings for a minority browser (Epiphany, using WebKitGTK)

Thanks, it's great to get a viewpoint from the that side after all the discussion on here.

> I suppose a wild proposal would be to allow most websites to receive accurate information, except websites that abuse this privilege by blocking small browsers. In this fantasy proposal, when Epiphany users discover a website blocking them or otherwise degrading the user experience, we would report the issue to Chrome, and Chrome would update its own quirks list to send a fake Epiphany user agent just to the affected website in order to intentionally break that website for all Chrome users, to force the website to fix the issue.

I like it in theory but I doubt that's ever going to happen in practice.
This proposal highlights the fundamental problem though and that problem is not the User-Agent string itself but websites misuse of it.

I think CH could alleviate some of the unintentional misuse that occurs but the only way you can really stop that misuse is not to send the data in the first place. That opens up a whole new can of worms as there are many use-cases that rely on that data. Removing the viability of those use-cases just to try and solve an issue with what are essentially, poorly coded websites seems misguided.  

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