• Amends1782
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    8 months ago

    I read a historical explanation of user agents and its just about the most retarded, convoluted thing ever. Definitely amusing though.

    • reddig33@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It’s probably time to get rid of user agent strings other than “desktop” or “mobile” and possibly “html version”. If everyone is following standards, then the content should just render.

      Letting the site know which browser you’re using just ends up fragmenting the web.

        • lazylion_ca
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          8 months ago

          And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.

          This is gold. Thank you.

      • Amends1782
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        8 months ago

        God I’m sorry man I read it a while back, just hadn’t thought about how stupid and useless they are now. I vaguely recall how it all got messed up and all the major browsers go intertwined, and it went back to Netscape and shit. I’ll try to find it, was a really great simple breakdown. Was left thinking how stupid and useless it was though.