On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 12:48 PM, Colin Bendell | +1.613.914.3387
<co...@bendell.ca> wrote:
Can you give me an example where UA parsing is punishing users of
alternative user agents? Is this a theoretical problem, or a
widespread problem? I'm not asking to be divisive, but because I know
for a fact that UA parsing is improving the user experience. I can
give you dozens of examples where we must resort to UA parsing for the
betterment of the user (for all flavors of UAs).
I would say it's the most serious web compatibility problem that exists
today. Our users complain and blame us when important websites are
broken in WebKit because of it. I have personally wasted days [1] of
[2] development [3] effort [4] playing with WebKit's user agent quirks
to get important websites to work properly. You can look at the history
of our quirks list for non-Safari ports [5] to get an idea of the
trouble we've had to deal with in recent years. That doesn't count
cases like [6] where I suspect user agent trouble, but just don't care
to investigate.
As a web engine developer, it's hard to understate how frustrating this
is, especially in cases like [7] where we had tons of users complaining
and the quirks were particularly difficult to write. It sometimes feels
like website developers are our enemy, just out to break our web
engine. Sometimes that's even true, e.g. when websites intentionally
decide to block access to unrecognized browsers, or scare our users
with claims that a browser is "unsupported" even though it works fine
with a UA quirk.
This is not a healthy situation for the web.
If everyone was careful and responsible with how they use the user
agent, it wouldn't be a problem, but at this point it's long been
spoiled for everyone. I'm sorry that this fallout affects developers
like you who are just trying to work around a bug. :(
On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 12:48 PM, Colin Bendell | +1.613.914.3387
<co...@bendell.ca> wrote:
Again I ask, is there room for compromise where we can expose the
version details in the UA (or some alternative) so that we ensure a
consistent and optimized user experience?
I don't know. I wish there was, but I don't think so. If you have any
suggestions, that'd be great, but I think it's going to be extremely
difficult or impossible to solve this problem in a way that makes
everyone happy.
I don't think I'll be happy until major browsers send the same,
standardized user agent as other major browsers. (Or send
fully-randomized user agents, but that's probably an impossible dream.)
Freezing just the version numbers is not good enough, but it's a step
in the right direction, and I really appreciate it.
[1] https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/206519/webkit
[2] https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/216139/webkit
[3] https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/216343/webkit
[4] https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/217203/webkit
[5]
https://trac.webkit.org/log/webkit/trunk/Source/WebCore/platform/UserAgentQuirks.cpp
[6] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=180995
[7] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171770#c4
_______________________________________________
webkit-dev mailing list
webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org
https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
