20 replies to this topic

[n_K]

"Sites should be feature sniffing, not browser sniffing. Do you have much experience with how UA strings work?"
Guess you've never been a web developer in your entire at all then.
Javascript comes with chome, firefox, etc. yes. A lot of browsers do not have javascript support (lynx, links, etc.), or have it disabled (no$cript).

[The_Decryptor]

This is just plain badly written code on Google's behalf, instead of checking for the version of the browser they check for the date it was compiled on, which is pretty damn meaningless (You could have a lower version with a higher build date, etc.) There's a reason Mozilla froze that date to be 2010-01-01 with 4.0, to discourage this, Google is just apparently slow to notice.

Edit: Ahh, I see the JS angle then. Still, your site shouldn't rely on JS to function and this is a server side issue on Google's behalf, not a client side issue.

[Kirkburn]

n_K, on 19 February 2012 - 19:11, said:

"Sites should be feature sniffing, not browser sniffing. Do you have much experience with how UA strings work?"
Guess you've never been a web developer in your entire at all then.
Javascript comes with chome, firefox, etc. yes. A lot of browsers do not have javascript support (lynx, links, etc.), or have it disabled (no$cript).

It's not an either/or situation, though - browsers inherently without JS support could still be UA detected. I don't have much sympathy for people who would noscript Google - of course you're going to lose features that way. Just like if I turn off CSS, sites will also look fairly weird - but I'm not going to complain about it. (Turn off the scripts you don't want to run, for sure, but turning off *all* scripts and expecting everything to be okay is over the top)

There's many articles online about browser and feature sniffing, and the benefits of each - but they pretty much always come down on feature sniffing. I know browser sniffing is commonly used, but that doesn't make it good.

Besides, that's not a defence of your original comment at all, which was that somehow it was all Mozilla's fault.

[Oz.]

I fixed it by adding this string to about:config

Preference name:
general.useragent.override

Value
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:33.0a1) Gecko/30330313 Firefox/33.0a1

[V23]

Fixed in the latest nightly for me.

[Semtex]

V23, on 21 February 2012 - 21:03, said:

Fixed in the latest nightly for me.

Yeap, They have backed out this bug, so UA is again with date....