The original thread provides more context. And acc. to a commenter there it’s part of some anti-ad blocker code - it builds an HTML fragment that should take 3s, then waits 5s, then checks if the fragment is gone. Another user mentions that “[it tries to detect FF only, not Chrome] Probably because there are other methods for Chrome that don’t apply to Firefox.”
Here are some instructions in case you are inclined to give it a try. You know, for research purposes. You can fill the blank in with this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36The first part of the Chrome user agent being “Mozilla” always amuses me.
I read a historical explanation of user agents and its just about the most retarded, convoluted thing ever. Definitely amusing though.
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.
Care to share?
Think I found it!!
https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
Also here is a vaguely related but interesting article
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.
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.
Also thanks a bunch for the info
