[Minutes] UA String Reduction - 2022-03-02

Attendees:

Version 100 blog posts were published on 02-15! 🚀
- https://web.dev/chrome-firefox-100/
- https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/02/version-100-in-chrome-and-firefox/
Any issues or questions about the announcement?
Chris: webcompat team launched a handful of site interventions to fix some v100 sites.
Hopefully that doesn’t mean there’s more breakage.
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1757212
- #90666 (www.smsv.com.ar)
- #90806 (www.brownells.com)
- #91087 (www.eurosportplayer.com)
- #94607 (bethesda.net)
- #95003 (www.hannaandersson.com)
- #96959 (www.screwfix.com)
- #98934 (simperium.com)
- #99339 (www.petalmail.com)
- #99700 (www.sc.com/in)
- #99772 (moje.pzu.pl)
- #100063 (genehmigung.ahs-vwa.at)
- #100194 (wifi.sncf)
More version100 webcompat issues
Mike: the chrome team should spend some more time doing outreach
AI: Chrome folks to spend some time doing outreach in the coming weeks, before we get to Beta.
Mike: beta 100 starts tomorrow.
Chris: 100 nightly starts tomorrow.

Ali: We were running v100 experiments since version 97 or so, but couldn’t run it on WebView. It just hit 99 stable, so I submitted a patch to be able to start an experiment on WebView. Hopefully we’ll be able to know if there’s any version concerns.
- “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.20 Safari/537.36”
Mike: We only have a few weeks window, right?
Ali: WebView is 100 on canary/dev, but nobody uses it really for Apps. The window is tight, but if we find some bugs we can go to the backup plan (major-in-minor).
Mike: And maybe webview only, right?
Chris: And 99.100.0.0 isn’t risk-free, right?
Ali: yeah, we have 2 experiment arms to test 100 as well as 99.100 to see if there’s any compat bugs we’re not aware of.
Chris: How did you determine website breakage? Just using telemetry? That’s what we’ve been doing. Not perfect, but it could be useful for some signal.

Karl will update the minutes: https://github.com/whatwg/compat/tree/main/uastring/minutes https://github.com/whatwg/compat/blob/main/uastring/minutes/2022-02-02-minutes.md
Karl will follow up on Hacks blog post sign-off.
Mike will ask Milica if we can publish on 02-14.
Chris will ask Mike Kaply about Firefox enterprise policy options.
- Do we need to write a SUMO article about enterprise options?
  - Not at this time.
  - Mike emailed a warning about version 100 to the enterprise user mailing list and described how to set the “network.http.useragent.forceVersion” pref in an enterprise policy file.
Mike will file an issue to include other browsers, e.g. Chromium-based browsers including Edge, Chinese browsers, Gecko-based SeaMonkey or WaterFox.
- whatwg#177

Any compat news from Google’s Origin Trial testing?
- Mike: so far things have been pretty good - we’re not aware of major breakage right now.
- Ali: This OT will finish when Chrome 101 comes out - been running for 6 versions. We’re also starting a deprecation trial, which allows a site to maintain the legacy UA string until Chrome 113.
Is Google still on track to ship reduced Chrome MINOR.BUILD.PATCH version numbers in Chrome 101 and reduced Desktop UA in Chrome 107?
- https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/#proposed-rollout-plan
- Mike: Yep, that’s the current plan. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/dcTStiBZVoQ
Mozilla is still evaluating options and timeline for Firefox UA reductions.
- Ali: I was looking at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/User-Agent/Firefox, are there future plans? Any plan to reduce things in the future?
- Chris: I have a draft doc, we’re looking at some options. Just a question of priorities.
- Ali: for the time being, MDN is accurate?
- Chris: yes, up to date, but a lot of old stuff that’s less relevant.
- Ali: for Chrome, we’re going to start with Desktop, then Mobile. Any reason we chose that order?
- Mike: yeah, there’s some use cases in certain countries relying on device model in the UA string on mobile. So, to me it made sense to give them some more time.