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Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

There's a whole class of old ASP sites that break if you take "like Gecko" out of the UA. It would be funny if it hadn't made me cry so often.

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Why not just break them?

It's not our call. We run a specialty aggregating search engine for a certain class of professionals, and the sites we pull data from were mostly developed when Clinton was president, as far as I can tell. We had a set of probably ten or fifteen sites that just wouldn't work right until we added "like Gecko" to the UA. Like I said, it would have been funny if we hadn't been tearing our hair out trying to figure out why the postback call wasn't firing.

Because then people use a competing browser that doesn't break the sites they use.

Seriously doubt it. Backwards-incompatible changes (mostly, deprecating some old kludges) had happened many times and I don't think there were any severe migrations.

I'm really not sure cons of User-Agent cleanup (or complete deprecation) outweigh the pros. At the very least I think it's not obvious and is debatable.

What are the pros? Smaller requests are only going to have a very small effect on speed or bytes used.

Smaller requests, right.

Also, some privacy improvements by having less data for browser fingerprinting.

Also, if we'd consider dropping User-Agent header altogether, less ways to detect an UA, so a bit harder to show "sorry, your browser in unsupported, this site is IE^H^H Chrome-only"

Obviously, just UA header isn't even remotely sufficient for any of those reasons, but would be a good start.

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