this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
178 points (97.8% liked)

Firefox

3990 readers
45 users here now

A community for discussion about Mozilla Firefox.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
178
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

A Mozilla employee recently released a Firefox addon to change the user agent to Chrome on sites the user enables it on.

top 16 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

You shouldn’t have to do this. I blame W3C org and their ilk for putting the rendering engine, browser brand, and browser version in the response header. All your browser should be telling the site is the versions of html, css, and JavaScript it supports and whether it’s mobile or desktop.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

versions of html, css, and JavaScript it supports

Given the level of support a browser has for something is basically the browser's version (there's no such thing as a version number for JavaScript or CSS for example, there's a spec that's kinda versioned, but browsers don't implement everything the same), you've basically just described user agent strings

We have feature detection approaches today that make UA based browser detection generally unnecessary but the horse has already bolted on that now

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

The evolution of the user-agent string isn't exactly the W3C's fault.

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If only web standards were a thing

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If anything we have too many web standards.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Someone should really make a unifying standard.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Situation: There are 15 competing standards.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Who knows what janky hidden state is hiding behind that button click? I'm copying and pasting 5 strung together commands all day over clicking a button!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Hmm had no idea this existed, thanks for sharing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Like a dusty Internet Explorer mask.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I believe the screenshot has a typo lol. The mask would be off if Firefox looks like Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

the screenshot shows them installing it on chrome, somehow. It doesn’t seem to exist for chrome. But if it did, off would be chrome and on would be firefox, which is what’s shown

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

So the mask is on in the screenshot? Like, a mask on the mask? This is so meta wtf