198
submitted 6 months ago by joojmachine@lemmy.ml to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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[-] dustyData@lemmy.world 76 points 6 months ago

Love the passive-aggressiveness and completely agree with it. Android and ChromeOS are Linux. They should report as such. Let's see those stats change.

[-] joojmachine@lemmy.ml 45 points 6 months ago

I personally see as benefiting us Linux users by forcing the rare website that "doesn't work with your operating system" to work if they want to reach that sweet over-a-billion-user Android market. Win-win for pretty much everyone.

[-] carotte 12 points 6 months ago

Is Firefox’s user share even big enough to have an impact on that?

still think this is a good move tho

[-] Vincent@feddit.nl 5 points 6 months ago

It sounds like the idea was actually the other way around: forcing the rare website that doesn't work with Firefox for Android (which only has a small share of the billion-plus-user Android market) to work.

[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 43 points 6 months ago

User agent strings are an outdated discriminatory concept. Browsers should be specifying supported JavaScript, HTML, and CSS versions instead.

[-] flamingmongoose 19 points 6 months ago

There is a JavaScript API to describe what features it supports

[-] Vincent@feddit.nl 5 points 6 months ago

I don't think any of those standards do versions anymore. They just add modules, and then browsers implement them in whatever order.

They could list the individual features, but of course, now you've exposed a huge fingerprinting vector. And that wouldn't even help for bugs, where the browsers would say they implement a feature, but then a bug would still require a browser-specific workaround. And you'd have to have access to it already via the HTTP request headers, because you might need to serve different content in response to it.

UA strings are not pretty, but it's not a simple problem to solve.

[-] MrSoup@lemmy.zip 40 points 6 months ago

Firefox 126 on Android has added "Linux" to the HTTP User-Agent String... Adding Linux finally to the Android User-Agent string has fixed some website compatibility issues plaguing Firefox for Android.

Are there still sites that rely on useragents, other than auto-selecting a package to download?

[-] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

On the one hand, anything that acknowledges Android as being a Linux system is welcome.

On the other hand... ugh, user-agent strings.

[-] flamingmongoose 12 points 6 months ago

I pray for the day web browsers get rid of "gecko Mozilla like"

[-] Asudox@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

Well, Android technically is another distro.

[-] joyjoy@lemm.ee 7 points 6 months ago

There are 3 classes of Linux distros:

  • gnu/glibc based for general use
  • alpine/musl based for containers
  • Android for people afraid of GPL
this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
198 points (100.0% liked)

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