On 07/06/2012, at 12:53 PM, Annie Sullivan <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 3:43 PM, Dean Jackson <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On 07/06/2012, at 12:05 PM, Annie Sullivan <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> In many browsers in the past, it's been >>> pretty easy to determine from "a" and "b" characters in the user agent >>> of many browsers which builds are "alpha" and "beta", and I haven't >>> heard of bugs caused specifically by checking for build type there. >> >> So why not just do that then? > > While it's nice that web developers don't seem to be using the build > type info in the user agent string in their code, user agent parsing > code is still very brittle. Some browsers, like Firefox, have had > buildtype characters in the user agent string for many years, so > parsing code can handle things like "Firefox/14.0a2". But Chrome > hasn't ever changed its version format, so we're worried about > breaking user agent parsers. Right, I understand that issue. But I don't think replacing something flakey and problematic with something that could be equally flakey and problematic is a big win. Your original problem was: > We'd love for these sites to be able to report regressions they see in > Chrome's performance as early as possible. But it turns out users on > different channels actually show different performance characteristics. Beta > users seem to have faster machines, for example. So in order to compare two > versions of Chrome, we need to compare data from users on the same release > channel. So we'd like sites who collect performance information to be able to > collect the build type in order to do that comparison. That sounds exactly like User Agent detection to me. You want to detect build version and type. I still think there are similarities to prefixing. The Web community (not just WebKit) is making a lot of noise about how being able to detect browsers might seem like a good idea at first but ends up causing longer-term headaches. By the way, I don't feel strongly about this. I'm just pointing out that I don't see any benefit and that what looks like a small change in metadata has just as important consequences as a significant technical change. Dean _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
