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Web dev: What browser is visiting the page?
User agent string:
A screenshot of a browser. The URL bar reads firefox://settings
, a button on the URL bar is labelled Netscape, a popup from the button reads: “You’re viewing a secure Opera page”, and the web page title reads “Chrome settings”.
“yer a jedi, harry” - Gandalf
User agents are essentially deprecated and are going to become less and less useful over time. The replacement is either client hints or feature detection, depending on what you’re using it for.
A URL is not an agent string, just saying.
Is it… (scrolls wheel of browsers) Lynx?
I’m still amazed at how usable Lynx is, given the insane premise of the application.
What’s so insane about it? Web browsers are an evolution of the old gopher protocol. All this stuff has roots in text consoles.
Functionally useless. With the web standardized, we shouldn’t need user agents anyway. It would be more beneficial to ask “do you support X, Y, and Z?”
That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do with the modern web, via feature detection and client hints.
The user agent in Chrome (and I think Firefox too) is “frozen” now, meaning it no longer receives any major updates.
Web UI for touch screens is a lot different than keyboard and mouse. I still switch to desktop most of the time because the mobile site will lack critical info, though. They “have” to streamline the experience for mobile, but I hate it when they fully remove features.
Youtube currently (for weeks now) does not work on Firefox, if you don’t use a Firefox user agent. Google doing sketchy things again.
YouTube works fine on Firefox…
I’ve not run into this issue and use Firefox exclusively with ublock origin
I use Charmeleon, with the effects described above.
Lazy web developers or clueless managers have entered the chat
A new browser touches the beacon