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January 14, 2020 05:21 pm

Google To Phase Out User-Agent Strings in Chrome

Google has announced plans today to phase out the usage of user-agent strings in its web browser Chrome. From a report: UA strings have been developed part of the Netscape browser in the 90s, and have been in use ever since. For decades, websites have used UA strings to fine-tune features based on a visitor's technical specifications. But now, Google says that this once-useful mechanism has become a constant source of problems, on different fronts. For starters, UA strings have been used by online advertisers as a way to track and fingerprint website visitors. "On top of those privacy issues, User-Agent sniffing is an abundant source of compatibility issues, in particular for minority browsers, resulting in browsers lying about themselves (generally or to specific sites) , and sites (including Google properties) being broken in some browsers for no good reason," said Yoav Weiss, a Google engineer working on the Chrome browser. To address these issues, Google said it plans to phase out the importance of UA strings in Chrome by freezing the standard as a whole. Google's plan is to stop updating Chrome's UA component with new strings (the UA string text that Chrome shares with websites). The long-term plan is to unify all Chrome UA strings into generic values that don't reveal too much information about a user. This means that new Chrome browser releases on new platforms such as new smartphone models or new OS releases will use a generic UA string, rather than one that's customised for that specific platform.

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