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.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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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.
Is Firefox’s user share even big enough to have an impact on that?
still think this is a good move tho
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.
User agent strings are an outdated discriminatory concept. Browsers should be specifying supported JavaScript, HTML, and CSS versions instead.
There is a JavaScript API to describe what features it supports
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.
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?
YouTube is obnoxious about it.
Google shows you a completely different search experience if you're using Chrome over any other mobile browser.
Speed test.net will nag you to download the app and only do the download test.
On the one hand, anything that acknowledges Android as being a Linux system is welcome.
On the other hand... ugh, user-agent strings.
I pray for the day web browsers get rid of "gecko Mozilla like"
Well, Android technically is another distro.
There are 3 classes of Linux distros:
- gnu/glibc based for general use
- alpine/musl based for containers
- Android for people afraid of GPL