Intent to Prototype and Ship: User-Agent Reduction Phase 4 (minor version reduction)
Mike Taylor
Contact emails
mike...@chromium.org, abe...@chromium.org, jadek...@chromium.org
Explainer
https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints#explainer-reducing-user-agent-granularity
Specification
https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction is the closest thing that specifies Chrome’s UA Reduction plans today. As these changes land in Chromium, the Compat Standard will be updated to reflect them (in the newly landed UA String section).
Summary
As previously detailed on the Chromium Blog, we intend to proceed with Phase 4 of the User-Agent Reduction plan.
In Phase 4, the MINOR.BUILD.PATCH version numbers are reduced to "0.0.0". For use cases requiring high-entropy full version information, developers are encouraged to migrate to the User Agent Client Hints API, in particular the Sec-CH-UA-Full-Version-List hint.
Blink component
TAG review
https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/640
TAG review status
Issues addressed
Risks
Interoperability and Compatibility
Any time you modify the User-Agent string there is a risk of some content somewhere depending on the previous format.
There should not be interop risks, as each browser sends its own User-Agent string. But there is a risk that content somewhere is relying on “non-zero” MINOR, BUILD, or PATCH information. My personal view is that the risk is low compared to the rest of the changes to come in later phases. But in order to mitigate the risk of this change, we intend to slowly roll it out via Finch and observe health metrics (i.e., HTTP 4XX and 5XX error codes, etc.) and bug reports from the community.
We've surveyed dozens of User-Agent parsing libraries, and as far as we know "0.0.0" will not create a problem syntactically. But the web can get pretty weird in ways we don't anticipate, hence the slow roll-out and incremental path towards User-Agent Reduction.
Gecko: Shipped/Shipping. Firefox has frozen (or capped) much of their UA string already.
WebKit: Shipped/Shipping. Safari has already frozen everything in their UA string except for version number info.
Web developers: Mixed signals. Reactions have ranged from positive to indifferent to negative, from various channels.
Debuggability
No special DevTools support needed.
Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
No
Flag name
reduce-user-agent
Requires code in //chrome?
False
Tracking bug
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1282229
Launch bug
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1282238
Estimated milestones
We aim to start rollout in M101. We will update this thread once the feature is shipping to 100% of the stable population.
Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
https://chromestatus.com/feature/6311349754789888
Chris Harrelson
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/05b6cf46-7bce-bd03-8a93-0db496a3a26e%40chromium.org.
Domenic Denicola
Contact emails
mike...@chromium.org, abe...@chromium.org, jadek...@chromium.org
Explainer
https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints#explainer-reducing-user-agent-granularity
Specification
https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction is the closest thing that specifies Chrome’s UA Reduction plans today. As these changes land in Chromium, the Compat Standard will be updated to reflect them (in the newly landed UA String section).
Rick Byers
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAM0wra_K7OF8TLhuWZXq8ROjb%2Bns2hDbPow%2BhFOFKMhc9pvUHQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Mike West
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+unsubscribe@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/05b6cf46-7bce-bd03-8a93-0db496a3a26e%40chromium.org.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+unsubscribe@chromium.org.
Joe Medley
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/05b6cf46-7bce-bd03-8a93-0db496a3a26e%40chromium.org.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
Mike Taylor
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/946a5d25-ebc3-4a42-8faf-fb8e13dd3abdn%40chromium.org.
Mike Taylor
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/946a5d25-ebc3-4a42-8faf-fb8e13dd3abdn%40chromium.org.