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

I agree that the separation of brand and engine is reasonable. It’s just that the hope for better usage by the community in the future is not a strong argument, and responsible developers could already do *today* what they *should* do in the future, i.e. rely on engines instead of brands where possible.

Turning passive fingerprinting into (detectable) active fingerprinting and offering information *selectively* is good as well. While most sites will request similar information and there won’t be much variation that could allow you to detect bad actors, this is still the strongest point of the proposal, I’d say.

But I really don’t think it will change anything about the complexity and length of strings (or sets), so maybe we should not put too much hope into that and avoid making the proposal more complex to make those dreams possible. It will not work.

All in all, it doesn’t appear to be a strong case for this new proposal replacing the current string where both have similar power and will suffer from similar problems. In the end, you will either have to support frozen old values forever or ultimately break backward compatibility.

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