In the user agent string on macOS, cap the reported OS version number to 10_15_7. Mozilla's Firefox team and Apple's Safari team have encountered a long tail of broken web content when the user agent string reports "Mac OS X 11_0_0" - basically, any macOS major version greater than 10. Per http://crbug.com/1175225 , both browsers have capped the reported macOS version to 10_15_7 to both work around this, and also slightly increase user privacy. We would like Chrome to follow this precedent.
Firefox and Safari have already shipped this change to their user-agent strings in order to fix a long tail of broken websites on macOS 11 and later, and to slightly increase user privacy. The risk to interoperability and compatibility is if Chrome doesn't ship the same change - these already-identified web sites are currently broken when visited in Chrome. User privacy is currently also slightly decreased in Chrome compared to Firefox and Safari.
Slight risk that developers who look for other web features in tandem with the OS release would be affected by no longer advertising the true macOS version in the user-agent string.
Slight risk that web developers or end users may be impacted by no longer being able to see the precise macOS version on the end users' machine in the user agent string. Aside from that, activating this immediately does not seem to pose significant risk, at least as far as feedback to the Firefox and Safari teams has indicated.
None.
No new support needed; DevTools already offers a way to override the user-agent string on a page-by-page basis.
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Hi Rick,
On 2/9/21 10:57 AM, Rick Byers wrote:
> This makes sense to me. But will there still be some non UserAgent
> header way to determine the actual MacOS version number (client hints
> etc.), eg. for sites trying to correlate performance or functionality
> issues to specific OS releases? If not, I'd want to put more effort into
> working with our partners to understand the cost of eliminating this
> functionality from the platform.
`Sec-CH-UA-Platform-Version` will provide this once UA Client Hints is
enabled by default, so figuring out the "real" macOS version will be
possible in the very near future.
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From our compat principals, in addition to data on the extent of breakage Alex is asking about, I think the key other question that could use more data is the "ease of adaptability" and "outreach" pieces. I notice that Sec-CH-UA only provides a JS mechanism (via getHighEntropyValues) for reading the OS version, no HTTP mechanism. What sort of outreach / partnership work has been done to understand the impact of that decision? Do we have any examples of partners confirming that they've successfully replaced their usage of OS version numbers with client hints? Has any existing OS-version-reporting logic in popular analytics or A/B testing tools been updated to take advantage of Client Hints? +Addy Osmani and +Shubhie Panicker who I imagine may have some insight into the ecosystem here.
Just a small point of clarification - the default low-entropy
hints (`Sec-CH-UA` and `Sec-CH-UA-Mobile`) do not provide OS
version. But `Sec-CH-UA-Platform-Version` is a hint that can be
requested and will provide that info via HTTP.
All good -- that's great feedback as well. I filed
https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints/issues/201 to make things
more obvious.
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Hi Yoav,Apologies - since Alex didn't reply to my email on February 11, I assumed his concerns were addressed.On your advice I spent some time investigating querying the HTTPArchive, and set up a project and billing. However, there's a high cost to making a mistake in the initial query - it will likely eat up the free quota, and I can't use my corporate card for this purpose. Do you have a suggestion for the precise query that should be run against the archive, and which specific table?
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So @Annie Sullivan was kind enough to dig up a list of top 1K sites (by time spent) on Mac, and I looked for the intersection with likely-broken origins from your recent query. The subset (top-site on left, busted origin on the right) was:github.io tensaix2j.github.io
github.io poesimulator.github.io
abc.net.au qed.splash.abc.net.auThis seems to indicate to me no top 1K site is currently broken.With that in mind, I'm happy for us to put a bandaid on this for a few releases while we come up with a better way to track breakage in the wild, but I'd also like to commit to removing this intervention at some date certain. Maybe we identify a list of sites and build a way to feed them the "wrong" UA..that would be OK. Perhaps the breakage we track goes down that we can flip back w/o any extra work. Whatever the eventual solution, short term, can we agree on a time-limit for freezing this? Say 3-6 releases?
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