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Comment by Banduin | Hacker News Reader

Chrome?

> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.40 Safari/537.31

For those who wonder how we ended up with such a mess of a user-agent string, this one is a classic: http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history

I'm thinking he meant more in terms of who builds a website that respects the "like Gecko" in the UA string as UA sniffing has been considered a sub par method for a while now.

I agree with "who does that" because I've never done UA sniffing so I had to look up the term "like Gecko" to even understand the context. As someone else has pointed out, that's for browsers that are not using the Gecko rendering engine. So essentially, everyone is trying to be "like Gecko" in one way or another.

I meant 'who does check that user agent', edited to clarify.

A lot of people, on Firefox OS we have a blacklist of sites we have to send Android like user agents to so we are served mobile friendly content: https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/build/ua-ove...

Its a sad situation.

YouTube is a particularly bad offender. Linked to their mobile site on a desktop? You get the ultra-basic WAP-like version, instead of the smartphone version or a redirect to the desktop version. Linked to their mobile site in Opera Mini? Yep, WAP-like version, despite the fact that Opera Mini would have no problems with the smartphone version.

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