2023-02-24-minutes.md

[Minutes] UA String Reduction - 2023-02-24

Attendees:

• Chris Peterson, Mozilla
• Mike Taylor, Google
• Raja Abdulhaq, Google

Welcome Raja Abdulhaq!

• He will be working on Android.

• Mike will ask John Wilander from WebKit team if he would like to join these meetings.

  • Mike didn’t do this yet. Let’s try again.

UA Reduction Rollout schedule

• Jan 23rd, 2023: the Phase 5 rollout is enabled for 50% of clients on M107 and above via Finch.
• February 7th, 2023: the Phase 5 rollout is enabled for 100% of clients on M107 and above via Finch.
• February 21st, 2023: the Phase 6 rollout is enabled for 1% of Android clients on M110 and above via Finch.
  • Hardcoding version “Android 10” and device model “K”
  • Mike feels device model is the riskiest change because we don’t know how sites may use it.
  • will stay at 1% for four+ weeks
• Mozilla is watching how the UA reduction is going and will follow later.
• How will UA reduction impact WebView?
  • Victor (and Raja?) will investigate.
  • UA reduction rollout have not included WebView yet.
  • WebView didn’t have UA-CH yet, but it now supports client hints. We’re looking into turning on UA-CH there as well, but no concrete plans yet.

Webcompat bugs: sites are detecting Firefox “rv:110” as IE11 (“rv:11”).

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1805967
• RESOLVED
• Sites think Firefox’s “rv:11” means IE11.
• New “rv:109” webcompat bug:
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1817530
• An anti-spam script is complaining the Firefox’s “rv:109” and “Firefox/110”+ versions doesn’t match.
• Firefox is temporarily freezing its UA’s “rv:NNN” at “rv:109” until version “rv:120” (Sep 2023: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1806690 )
• Mike blogged about this at https://miketaylr.com/posts/2022/12/how-the-IE-11-ua-string-broke-sites-in-firefox.html

UA-CH

• [chris] I’m still prototyping the navigator.userAgentData API for Firefox in my spare time.
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1750143
  • Actually made a tiny bit of progress over the holidays!
• Chrome’s UA-CH implementation exposes Linux kernel version
  • https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1381304
  • Mike will fix to return an empty string (per the spec):
  • https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/4005183
  • Mike will work with Raja to write intents and probably land in Q1, pending approvals.
• Mike to take an AI to file a bug / investigate Google Business sites (like https://steakhouse-319.business.site/) using the deprecated uaFullVersion.
  • Mike is in discussion with some internal teams to migrate from deprecated FullVersion to Full-Version-List.
  • Victor on Mike’s team will try to remove FullVersion next year. He will try to find whoever runs the “business.site” infrastructure as well. Will follow up on this next time.
  • Search for “clienthintsua” to find FullVersion, deprecated in favor of fullVersionList.