this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
27 points (93.5% liked)

Hacker News

4123 readers
1 users here now

This community serves to share top posts on Hacker News with the wider fediverse.

Rules0. Keep it legal

  1. Keep it civil and SFW
  2. Keep it safe for members of marginalised groups

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
27
Changing User-Agent to Google Chrome drastically improves YouTube load times (twitter.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

Here are some instructions in case you are inclined to give it a try. You know, for research purposes. You can fill the blank in with this:

 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

The first part of the Chrome user agent being "Mozilla" always amuses me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I read a historical explanation of user agents and its just about the most retarded, convoluted thing ever. Definitely amusing though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

It’s probably time to get rid of user agent strings other than “desktop” or “mobile” and possibly “html version”. If everyone is following standards, then the content should just render.

Letting the site know which browser you’re using just ends up fragmenting the web.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Care to share?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.

This is gold. Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

God I'm sorry man I read it a while back, just hadn't thought about how stupid and useless they are now. I vaguely recall how it all got messed up and all the major browsers go intertwined, and it went back to Netscape and shit. I'll try to find it, was a really great simple breakdown. Was left thinking how stupid and useless it was though.

load more comments (4 replies)