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

Do you think that with engines instead of browser brands, website operators will suddenly all become responsible citizens of the web? That is, engines will not just be the new browser brands when it comes to browser identification?

If my browser has `CustomEngine`, but sites restrict certain features or serve a degraded experience due to that information, my browser will either send `CustomEngine (Chromium)` or `"CustomEngine", "Chromium"` or `"Chromium"; version=80,  "CustomEngine"; version=28`.

Again, website operators may exclusively rely on true equivalence classes and everything may be great. But why should anything be different with `Sec-CH-UA` and `Sec-CH-UA-Engine` instead of `User-Agent`? With regard to the incentives and underlying problems, nothing has changed.

By the way, as for randomly returning different values (e.g. in 25 % of all cases), I think it’s obvious that this won’t work for the use cases that make `User-Agent` something that people rely on today. It’s the same situation as with including fake brands or dropping oneself from the set.

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Received on Thursday, 13 February 2020 18:05:44 UTC